Nelson: The Dreadful Havoc Read online

  NELSON: THE DREADFUL HAVOC

  Jan Needle

  © Jan Needle 2014

  Jan Needle has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd 2014

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHRONOLOGY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Extract from The Devil’s Luck by Jan Needle

  CHRONOLOGY

  1758 Nelson born at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, September 29.

  1767 His mother Catherine dies, December 26.

  1770 Battle with Spain over Falkland Islands threatened. Nelson entered as midshipman on the Raisonnable, November 27, by her captain, his mother’s brother Maurice Suckling.

  1771 Joins the Raisonnable in March.

  Transfers to the Triumph, May 15.

  Two trips to West Indies as able seaman on merchant ship Mary Ann, to gain experience.

  1772 Rejoins the Triumph, July.

  1773 Expedition to the Arctic, June to September, on bomb ketch Carcass.

  Sails to the East Indies on the Seahorse, November.

  1775 American War of Independence starts in April. Uncle Maurice Suckling becomes Comptroller of the Navy.

  1776 Travelling home from East Indies, an invalid, March to September. Suckling makes him acting lieutenant.

  1777 Passes lieutenant's exam, April 9. Appointed to the Lowestoffe, April 10.

  Returns to the West Indies, July 19.

  1778 Alliance between France and the United States of America, February.

  Maurice Suckling dies, July 14.

  Moves to HMS Bristol, promoted first lieutenant, September 5.

  Made commander of the Badger, December 8.

  1779 Promoted post captain of Hinchinbrook, June 11.

  Spain and Britain at war, June 16.

  1780 Commands naval force up Rio San Juan, January to April.

  Appointed captain of the Janus, but too ill to take command, April.

  Invalided back to Jamaica. Tries to recover health.

  1780 Invalided home to England on the Lion. Arrives Portsmouth, December 1.

  Chapter One

  Tim Hastie, once a soldier, now the servant of a dying man, stood beside his charge as their ship passed by Fort Charles. The breeze was gentle as they slipped into the straits, and the transport received no formal salute from the battery. Nelson sighed.

  ‘It is thanks to me, perhaps, this island still stands free. Look at those guns, Tim. All my work, mine and Despard’s. This harbour is impregnable. The Count of D’Estaing turned away. His spies had told him, surely, that he would be repulsed.’

  Nelson, still on his feet despite all Hastie’s efforts to make him rest, almost staggered as a wave rolled the transport Victor on to her larboard bilge, but shook off the helping hand before it even reached his shoulder. He was not to be helped. There was nothing wrong with him. He was returning in triumph, if a little racked by his recurrents.

  ‘The devil take this ague,’ he said, robustly. ‘God damn it, Timothy. Even the cesspit of the London Pool is better than the air out here.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Hastie, calmly. ‘But soon we will have solid ground beneath our feet, and mosquitoes less the size of gulls. Why, I guess it will be almost a pleasure to be nibbled by ’em. Old friends!’

  Inside the shelter of the Palisades, the Victor’s motion grew smoother, but her speed was dwindling. It was some few miles before they would reach their berth, although a signal could be made for Nelson to be carried off by pinnace if he wished it. A fast yawl had brought news of his pending arrival two days before, with news of his increasing sickness. A lesser man, he boasted, would have come ashore in a box.

  A fitter man, as both he and Hastie were well aware, would have come as the captain of the frigate Janus, though. The news of his promotion had reached him in Greytown, at the entrance to the San Juan river, where he was to transfer his current ship – the Hinchinbrook – to Cuthbert Collingwood, and take up the new command on his return to the Jamaica station. He was in no state to regret the passing of his old ship, or to congratulate Cuthbert on his promotion. He was, to tell the truth of it, in no state to command his bowels, let alone a 44-gun fifth rate.

  Nelson, to Tim Hastie’s knowledge, was a clear-sighted man, but he had his areas of blindness, no disputing it. He had made no comments to Collingwood about the state he found his old ship in, but both men knew that it was bad. The Hinchinbrook had remained at Greytown as guardship while Nelson had led the naval part of the expedition up to Lake Nicaragua, and the teredo worm had revelled in what they had been offered. A wooden hull, not sheathed in copper, and the brackish waters of the estuary. The Hinchinbrook was old. Within a few short weeks the leaks would be beyond her pumps’ capacity.

  No reference had been made to this as the two men shook hands on the quarterdeck. They were old and close friends, the short and ginger lively one, and the towering, glowering man without a sense of fun. In the same spirit they made little comment on the fact that the ship was full of dying sailors. Nelson had left near three hundred men at Greytown on his ship. Before he left to go back to Jamaica, two hundred were dead and buried on the shore.

  Cuthbert, although ten years older but of lesser rank than Horatio, had no envy that had ever been detected. He made a habit, as he put it now, of ‘following in your footsteps and your cast-off ships, my hinny. I shall look after this one like a desperate nursemaid.’

  He felt it unnecessary to report that the bottom was falling out, and the worms were gorging at ever greater speed. It would not be many weeks, indeed, before the Hinchinbrook embraced her watery grave.

  As he gripped Nelson by the hand in the thick, hot air, he felt the sick man shiver. Both knew that he was supporting him, as his own legs could not. Both ignored the knowledge.

  ‘How if we gan down to the cabin now?’ he said. His broad Tyneside accent, so well-known and so comforting that it made Nelson smile. ‘You could have a canny sup o’ tea.’

  The voyage back to Jamaica had been a blessedly short one, especially compared with the dreadful progress the flotilla had made in sailing out to Greytown. That time Nelson had been escorting transports and near two thousand assorted soldiers, drunks and riffraff. This time his shattered body was returning in fine style.

  Except, as both he and Hastie knew, the expedition had been a failure. The sort of failure that the little man from Norfolk, who had been visited by a ‘golden orb that glittered with angelic purpose’ and knew he’d one day be an admiral, found impossible to bear.

  Then, as the detail boarded to bring him on to shore, the worst humiliation came. He was unfit to stand, and even he acknowledged it. He had to be carried overside, just like a sickly maiden, in a cot.

  Hearing an attempt at speech, Tim bent his ear to Nelson’s mouth, but merely heard a groan.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’ he whispered. ‘Oh sir, believe me, you will soon be well.’

  The noise that Nelson made was the essence of bitterness. The very essence.

  ‘I may as well be dead,’ he said. ‘If I should fail, Tim Hastie – then I may as well be dead.’

  Chapter Two

  Tim Hastie, soldier, servant, apothecary’s apprentice from North Wales and Liverpool, wrote home to Sarah, his betrothed, later on that night. It was
an anguished letter, full of despair. Before it reached her, he was almost certain Nelson might be dead.

  The cot had been brought ashore by men in Navy uniform, one of whom he recognized. He was a fat, bluff, red-faced sort, and an ‘Honourable’ in his own right. Like almost every other Navy man that Hastie knew, however, he stood on neither rank nor ceremony. He welcomed the amanuensis with a nod, and thrust his florid face into the shaded cot.

  And pulled back so sharply – as Tim wrote it in his letter home – that “he almost reeled.”

  ‘Gad, Mr Hastie! What have you done to him? As a nursemaid, man, you have been—’

  ‘My face, my dear, must have given my whole soul away. Indeed, I felt that I must break in tears. For Captain Cornwallis is a bold man, and goes at everything like a bull at china. I think he was jesting to hide his own pain at poor Nelson’s visage. But for the moment…’

  For the moment Cornwallis, known to some friends as ‘Mr Whip,' was thinking at his highest speed. As local orderlies bustled to remove Nelson to the local hospital, he puffed his chest up like a bullfrog, and waved them furiously away.

  'The hospital? The hospital? Hell and damnation, Captain Nelson has come home to live, not die! Hastie, there is only one place on this island where that can come about, and only one nurse to look after him. If he has baggage, abandon it till later. Guard him while I get conveyance.'

  Cornwallis, son of an earl and brother of General Cornwallis, the would-be scourge of the rebels of the Thirteen Colonies, expected to be obeyed. Within short order, Nelson was shifted through the busy streets away from the quayside, and up into the town. Hastie was dubious at first, for Cornwallis directed the procession to what looked from the outside to be a low-class boarding house. Before anybody had time to knock, however, the door burst open to reveal a handsome negress who clearly knew Cornwallis well.

  'What is this then, Billy Blue?’ she said brusquely. ‘Surely not another dying soul you wish to foist on me?'

  She moved to the cot and pulled the covers back.

  'Mrs Cuba—' Cornwallis started, but was immediately cut short.

  'This man is ill,' she snapped. 'Please to not give me of your nonsense now. Ladies!' She turned quickly, and gestured at some women who had appeared like magic at the door. 'Best room! Set about it, hussies, before you feel my tongue and hand!'

  Hastie felt that he was caught up in a whirlwind, swept headlong and willy-nilly with the rest. It was woman's work, Mrs Cuba insisted, and no man dared or cared to go against her.

  ‘Any black slave who calls Cornwallis “Billy” is a better man than me,’ he wrote. ‘She calls him Coachee also, God alone knows why. Coachee, Billy Blue, and sometimes Mr Whip. Some things, cariad, are better left unasked.’

  Nor, as he learned later, was this estimable woman a slave, although she had been. Before she got her lodging house she was housekeeper to Cornwallis, ‘maybe his mistress ditto, it is the way out here I’m told. But she made herself so loved and necessary, he must needs make her free. She is a marvel, dear, and if anyone can save Nelson, it is surely her. I fear, though, it must be touch and go.’

  Cuba Cornwallis's methods were out of any order Hastie had cognizance of. He had already clashed with Dr Moseley, the medical superintendent on Jamaica, and his deputy Thomas Dancer he had shipped out to San Juan ‘to do the dirty work.’

  Both insisted that despite what some Spanish and the natives on the Main believed, the recurrent fever, the ague, the malaria, call it what you will, was caused by bad air and rotting vegetation, and had nothing at all to do with insect bites. Hastie's observation had been that men fell ill within three weeks or so of being attacked by the whirring, stinging creatures named after the inhabitants of the Mosquito Shore.

  Mrs Cuba, however, cared nothing for ideas brought westward by the white man; her scorn ran very deep. Also for white man's sensibilities. As Tim looked on aghast, she smiled her broadest smile, sucked her teeth in the Jamaican way, and lifted Nelson from his cot onto a bed, where her nurses stripped him of every stitch of clothing and began to sponge him down.

  Hastie, naturally, had never seen his master naked, despite the times he had tended him in fevers. He marvelled now at the sight before him. Nelson, he knew, was as brave as a lion, which several times he’d thought would be the death of him.

  ‘Sarah,’ he wrote, ‘he was like a stripped prawn off of Formby beach. He will not give his height to any man, just smiles and jests in a clownish way he sometimes has, but I have heard men say he is five foot and not a whisker more. I would say five five myself, but on a ship it is harder to tell than you could guess at. The damn thing – forgive me, love – will never keep quite still.’

  Whatever Nelson's height, his weight could not, in Tim's opinion, have been above nine stone. He was hollow chested, hollow in the belly, and a ‘nasty, pasty white.’

  He added: ‘Quite frank, my love, he looked like death had already took him, apart from his skinny form was full of muscle, bespeaking many years of handling oars and tackles. He was an able seaman once, you know, on a merchantman, and one reason why his men seem prone to loving him is that he mucks in on any task, however hard, and thinks he cannot lead in what he cannot do.’

  Mrs Cuba notwithstanding, by the end of the first day on shore, Hastie's fears had grown rather than diminished. Her minions washed and dressed him, covered him in clean linen, and fed him with exotic fruits and delicacies, but strangely, Cuba asked him to taste each foodstuff before giving it to Nelson, as if to imply that black women could not be trusted not to poison their superiors.

  ‘She was shaming me deliberately in a minor way, and I cannot blame her for it. Most blacks arrive as slaves torn from their husbands, wives and children, and it is only the lucky few who ever are called free. Free for what? To become servants or mercenary soldiers or starving drunks.

  ‘We treat the Irish not much better, cariad, for they arrive as indentured servants, and when they are released in five or seven years or so, their freedom likewise is a hollow jest. Some men wonder why they do not rise up against us, but perhaps the gun, the pike, the sword, the chain explain it.’

  So when Mrs Cuba offered him he tasted, thanked her for the trouble she had taken, and declared everything most excellent. Poor Nelson, though, could manage scarcely a mouthful. He hoped she would not let him die.

  Chapter Three

  On the fourth night, Nelson seemed to reach a crisis. His ‘ministering angels’ had retired to get some rest after many hours at his side, and only Hastie sat on still. Night fell very early in Jamaica, and the only light was from a low candle, whose flame was long and yellow, hardly flickering in the stillness, topped by a feather of black smoke.

  Tim felt the need to write some more to Sarah, whom he was missing sorely. He had marched away from Liverpool long beyond two years before, and was tortured by visions of her face. Thank God that she could write, and did. So many of his fellow soldiers were at the mercies of the more literate, who might not only charge for reading missives, but made free with their contents, cruelly. Tim had given up trying to help the most hapless when he had become Nelson’s man. He had not time, nor ever might again, he feared.

  Outside, the town was hardly quiet, despite the lack of wind. Since the expedition had returned the streets and squares of Port Royal were full of roaming soldiers and militiamen, more broken down and disaffected than had been the case before. Had so many of them not died, law would have died completely. But even enfeebled men could drink and act the hooligan. The streets at night were noisy, and not the place to walk alone.

  In the room, though, the most insistent noise was Nelson’s breathing. It was hoarse and laboured, interspersed with sighs and groaning. And now and then a silence would ensue, when all breathing stopped for such a time that Hastie feared the worst, and moved to the bedside, and stared down. Then the eyes would roll, beneath closed lids, and a noise like a choking animal would rise, and tear at Nelson’s body and Tim’s heart. He had
grown used to letting tears fall now, where not so long ago it shamed him. He could not see how this white-skinned, bloodless morsel could ever come to health again.

  He had a fan with him, and after one long hiatus of the sick man’s breath, he moved it close to his face to dislodge a mosquito. The palm leaf scratched the skin, and Nelson’s eyes, startlingly shone out.

  ‘Sir,’ said Hastie. ‘Forgive me, it is nothing. Just a stinging fly.’

  And Nelson smiled, and blinked, and smiled again. And spoke.

  ‘Mother, don’t die,’ he said, clearly. ‘Mother, please don’t die. I am not nine yet, and you must not go. Please Mother, do not die just yet. It is Christmas time.’

  Hastie had heard this, in some part, before. Even in Nicaragua, when in high fever, Nelson had called upon his mother. His eyes, like now, were usually wide open, and he could see, although not perhaps what other men could see. He would stare, and smile, and blink. Sometimes he’d lift a hand to make a gesture, then let it limply fall.

  ‘All will be well,’ said Hastie, softly. ‘This will pass, I promise you. It is a fever, sir. I will bring you something. Your apothecary is here.’

  ‘You must be brave,’ said Nelson, and his voice had altered. He was himself his mother, speaking her remembered words. His eyes had closed again, and he was groaning. Then he looked at Hastie, apparently quite conscious.

  ‘My mother said I must be brave,’ he said, matter of fact. ‘Tim, she died when I was nine, St Stephen’s Day. All my brothers and my sisters, and my poor father, a clergyman. She said I must be brave. And I have been, I have been and I will. Oh mother, my poor mother. So young.’

  Tim Hastie, when the eyes were firmly closed and the breathing normal, took a sip of rum and water, and dabbed his sweating face. Nelson had grown up in Burnham Thorpe, which he described as a low, cold place, a land of marsh and mist and muddy creeks, quite comfortless. His father was a kindly man – he did insist – but strict.