‘Horatio! Be sensible. Government have already promised they’ll defend your suit. You acted in their behalf, even Admiral Hughes admits that.’
‘But I face another suit. Remember those men I caught stealing Admiralty funds? Oliver, did you know that I found them in default of more than two million pounds?’
‘Governments are never happy with an underling who points out mistakes, even if they run to two million. But you really have no cause to flee.’
‘I’m heading for France. I’ll finally master that despicable language against the day I capture some great French ship of war and have to deliver terms to her captain.’
At this bizarre reasoning, Wrentham exploded: ‘Horatio, you’ll never be happy in France. Let me lay your case before the Admiralty. My grandfather, the earl, does command a hearing.’
Nelson did not seem to hear this assurance as he continued: ‘What I shall really do, Alistair, is pass through France to St. Petersburg, where I shall offer my services to Catherine of Russia and her fleet.’
This statement was so shocking that Wrentham was rendered speechless, and Nelson continued, with great excitement and much movement of his hands: ‘Remember that damned Scotsman John Paul, who turned his back on us in the American war, added the name Jones and became their naval hero? Well, when they wouldn’t make him an admiral, which I must say he deserved, for he knew how to fight his ship, he hied himself off to Russia and received a top assignment from the czarina, and so far as I know, is still there. I’d enjoy fighting alongside a man with spirit like that.’
Now Wrentham became angry: ‘Horatio, you’re no John Paul Jones. The man was as fickle as a spring breeze. Born a Scot, should have fought on our side, offered his services to France, then the American colonies, now Russia … and God knows where next. Maybe Turkey, maybe France again.’ He came to stand over Nelson as he delivered his ultimatum: ‘You’re English, Nelson. Could never be anything else. The lawsuits? I’ll attend to them. For the present, I want you to unpack … and please accept this small gift to help you restore your sense of propriety.’
Having anticipated that Nelson might be in pitiful straits, he had brought with him from his bank in London £200, which he now gave to his former commander. For some moments Nelson just stood there, both hands thrust forward with the notes resting in them. Then he spoke: ‘The humiliations I’ve known. The endless letters which receive no responses. The appeals to the Admiralty which go unanswered. The crawling, the scraping, the inability to buy your wife the dresses she merits, the constant taking of money from an old father, the impotence when your married sister needs a little help. I’ve lived in hell these past years, none worse on earth, and if war comes and I get a ship, God help the Frenchman that I go up against, for I shall be all fire and black powder.’
But then his mood changed completely, for he waved the notes in the air and cried: ‘Ever since they’ve remade me into Farmer Horace, I’ve wanted to buy myself a pony. Never had the money. But if I’m destined to be a farmer and not a naval officer, I want that pony!’ Almost joyously he led Wrentham into the village where he had long ago spotted the fine little animal he craved. To the owner’s surprise he cried: ‘Jacko, me boy, I’ll take her. Here’s a hundred and you can bring me the change when convenient.’ And with a satisfaction he had not known for years, he led the beast home, saying truthfully: ‘If I’m to be a farmer, Alistair, I shall be a good one.’
The prospect of this potentially great sea captain wasting his life as a farmer disgusted Wrentham, and when he further saw the miserable condition in which Nelson lived subservient to his father, and the whining character of Mrs. Nelson, suddenly so much older in appearance and manner, and the ever-present penury, he became so agitated that he was tempted to reveal something about which he should never have spoken and which he would later regret: ‘Nelson, when you allowed me to visit that great plantation in Jamaica, I met the lovely daughter of the place, nineteen she was and too old for me. But I kept talking about you so much that she said: “I’d like to meet your Captain Nelson,” and it was arranged. I would hurry back to Port Royal with an invitation from her family. They were rich. They loved the navy. And you would visit Trevelyan. But when I reached the fort, you had sailed away … only hours before.’
He bowed his head over the kitchen table, then said: ‘It all could have been so different. That one would have followed you even into battle.’
Nelson coughed to catch Wrentham’s attention, then said: ‘Alistair, it is infamous that you should tell me such a story … at such a time,’ and he was about to order the young officer from his father’s house when his eye fell upon a chance mix of vegetables left upon the kitchen table in preparation for tomorrow’s stew, and their juxtaposition captivated him.
‘Supposing that you and I were facing the French fleet, off Antigua, say, or in some other ocean, and they were trying to escape us in this formation …’ Suddenly the kitchen table was filled with potatoes representing the French fleet and onions the English, and long into the night he revealed the naval strategies he had been devising during his walks through the Norfolk countryside: ‘You remember what I told you in Port Royal about Admiral Rodney’s bold move at The Saints. He wheeled and brought his full force smack into the middle of the French line. Look at the confusion.’ And now the table was filled with a great melee of French potatoes thrown into confusion by English onions.
‘But, Alistair! Suppose in the next battle, and there will be one, of that we can be sure, for the French will never let us rest, nor we them … Suppose that this time just as we seem about to repeat Rodney’s strategy, for which the French will certainly be prepared, we suddenly break our attacking fleet into two lines, me here to port, you there to starboard, well separated, and in that formation we slam into the French fleet. What terrible confusion in two quarters. Pairs of ships fighting each other across the entire ocean.’
When Wrentham saw the vast mix of potatoes and onions, he asked: ‘But how will our two forces maintain contact—for signals, for battle orders?’ and Nelson looked at him aghast: ‘Alistair! On that day of battle when I send you off to starboard, you get no further orders from me. Each ship in your line becomes its own command. You fight your battle, I fight mine.’
‘It sounds like chaos.’
‘Planned chaos, in which I would expect you and every captain under you to do his duty … his sensible duty.’ He ended with a conviction that had grown upon him in recent months: ‘The French like to lay off and fire at our masts and sails. We like to move in close and rake their decks. In close, Alistair! Always in close!’
Through the long night they moved their fleets back and forth, and when dawn broke they were still at their imaginary battles, the seas red with blood and filled with sinking ships. And before breakfast Wrentham helped his old commander unpack the bags that might otherwise have carried him to Russia.
Captain Alistair Wrentham, in fulfilling every promise he had made at Norfolk, preserved the naval career of his friend. Government did step forward to defend him against the spurious lawsuits; Admiralty did listen to Wrentham’s impassioned defense of Nelson; and even the French came to his assistance, for in Paris the madmen of the French Revolution kept making such threatening moves that war obviously loomed. Toward the end of January 1793, when spies hurried to London with irrefutable proof that ‘the entire French fleet seems to be assembling for an attack on our coast,’ the Admiralty behaved exactly as Nelson had predicted that day in the coffeehouse: they sent messengers galloping north to inform Captain Horatio Nelson that they wanted him to take immediate command of a major ship of the line.
When the messengers departed, he stood alone in the rectory, not gloating over the triumph he had foreseen nor railing against the injustices he had suffered, but steeling himself for darkened storms he saw ahead: Now comes the test of greatness. I escape from the vale of despond and sail into the clash of battle, and may God strengthen me in my resolve.
It w
ould be popular in later decades to claim that Admiral Horatio Nelson had forged his revolutionary strategies and imperturbable character during his varied experiences at sea, especially in the Caribbean, but that was not the case; they were painfully annealed in those four dismal years when he was ‘on the beach’ in his father’s rectory in Norfolk. There, humiliated, impoverished and ignored, he had hammered out his principles and devised those stratagems which would make him perhaps the finest officer ever to command a battle fleet. Aware of the miracle that had been wrought within him, he said farewell to his self-enforced prison in Norfolk, turned his face toward London, and cried: ‘Horace no more! Horatio forever!’
On 7 February 1793, when France was ablaze with war, Nelson, once again an active captain in His Majesty’s Navy, stepped aboard the trim 64-gun Agamemnon, turned aft to salute the quarterdeck, and took immediate steps to whip his handpicked crew into fighting shape.
Some days later, with all the excitement of a midshipman eleven years old hastening forward to inspect his first ship, he shouted to his men: ‘Cast off!’ and to his helmsman: ‘Steady as she goes!’ Feeling the great ship laden with guns rolling beneath his feet, he headed down the Channel for the Mediterranean, where destiny waited to award him victory at sea, scandal in Naples with the bewitching Lady Hamilton, and immortality at Trafalgar.
* * *
* As originally phrased by Nelson, it was ‘Nelson confides every man …’ in the old sense of is confident that. One fellow officer suggested that expects was a more idiomatic word, another that the message would be stronger if it said England expects … and Nelson eagerly accepted each improvement. The word that was not included in the final twelve-flag hoist, done in the system devised by Sir Henry Popham in 1803.
IN 1784 VISITORS to one of the liveliest spots of the Caribbean, the public square of Point-à-Pitre on the French island of Guadeloupe, were likely to chance upon three young creoles—clearly the best of friends, even to a casual observer—who, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, would be plunged into a drama not of their own making and culminating in horrid excesses.
The square was a spacious, friendly area, lined with trees and made hospitable by numerous wooden benches and a central kiosk where the town band played and from which citizens could purchase hot coffee and croissants as they relaxed in the sun. At its broad southern end the square opened upon the sea, where boats clustered, white sails shining against blue waters. The other three sides were defined by private homes built in the style of Mediterranean France, except that where stone would have been used in Marseilles, here the preferred material was wood, most often a handsome mahogany impervious to insects. Each house had a second-floor veranda adorned with bright tropical flowers, making the square a garden in which happy citizens congregated throughout the day.
Off the eastern side of the square ran a small street, and on a corner thus formed stood a house that was a masterpiece: three stories high, with two verandas, not just one, and cascading from each, flowers—yellow, red and blue. But what made it unforgettable to those who admired it as they took their coffee from the kiosk below was the delectable latticework, woven with very slender iron strands, which decorated the two extended verandas. ‘Metallic lace,’ an approving woman had called the effect, and her description had stuck: Maison Dentelle—House of Lace.
On the ground floor, Monsieur Mornaix, one of Point-à-Pitre’s leading citizens, kept the office from which he conducted his banking and money-lending business, but the upper levels, the ones with the lacework, were reserved for his family, and often young men idling their time in the square below would gaze longingly at the flower-bedecked house and sigh: ‘There she is!’ and their eyes would follow Eugénie Mornaix, the banker’s lovely young daughter, as she strolled one of the verandas. ‘She’s one of the flowers,’ the young men said.
Their adoration was fruitless, for her affection had been claimed. In the much simpler wooden house on the opposite corner—two stories, one modest veranda, a few flowers—where the town’s apothecary, Dr. Lanzerac, kept his small shop, lived his son Paul. He had known Eugénie since birth, and they had now reached the exciting age when they were beginning to realize that each had a special attachment to the other, for he was fourteen and she, much more clever at the moment, was twelve.
Their parents, hardworking shopkeepers of the upper middle class, approved of the special relationship which seemed to be developing between their children, for the two families shared many attributes and interests. Both were devoutly Catholic, finding the church a comforting guide to behavior on earth and later in heaven; both were frugal, believing that God meant for His children to work hard and save their money to ensure protection throughout a long life, and every member of both families loved France with a passion that had never been exhibited by the Spanish colonists for their homeland. Monsieur Lanzerac, the apothecary, liked to tell the young people: ‘A Spaniard respects his homeland, a Frenchman loves his.’ In the entire reach of French influence, from the Rhine River to St.-Domingue, there were no Frenchmen more patriotic than those found on the sugar island of Guadeloupe.
It lay only eighty-five miles north of Martinique, but it cherished the differences between the two colonies, for as Lanzerac Père explained to Dutch sea captains who worked their ships through the blockades to sell their contraband goods at Point-à-Pitre: ‘You ask the difference between the two islands? Simple. Back in France they always speak of “The Grand Messieurs of Martinique,” because nobody there does a day’s work, and of “The honest bonnes gens of Guadeloupe,” because they know that here we do. What does Martinique send the homeland? Polished reports. What do we send? Sugar and money.’
There was a greater difference: Martinique was an ordinary kidney-shaped island, a clone of hundreds like it in the world, but Guadeloupe was completely unique, beautiful in fact, mysterious in origin. In shape and color it resembled a green-gold butterfly, drifting lazily to the northwest; the green came from the heavy cover of vegetation, the gold from the constant play of sunlight. It was really two islands with the two butterfly wings separated by a canal so preposterously narrow that a drunk once said: ‘Give me three beers and I’ll jump from one island to the other.’ The eastern wing of the butterfly was low and flat and composed of tillable farmland; the western, of high and rugged mountains that permitted no cross-island roads. The explanation for this remarkable difference lay in the origins of the two halves: the eastern had risen from the rock base of the Caribbean forty million years ago, and this had provided ample time for its peaks to be eroded away, but the western had achieved its rise to the surface only five million years ago, and its mountains were still young. Born of different impulses at vastly different times, the two halves were now semijoined in one magnificent whole, and the people who lived on Guadeloupe said: ‘Ours is an island a man can love,’ and they felt sorry for those who had to live on what they called ‘that other island,’ Martinique.
In this green-gold paradise the two creole children developed a passionate attachment to both their native island and their French homeland, so that words like glory, patriotism and the French manner echoed in their hearts like the Angelus sounding for evening prayer. These were solemn commitments, profound allegiances, and Paul, who attended the school taught by the local priest, often told Eugénie, who stayed at home in her House of Lace learning the secrets of kitchen and laundry: ‘When I’m older I shall go to France and study in Paris and become a soldier of the king.’ When he said the awesome word king he meant Louis XVI, whose woodcut portrait printed in great numbers graced the main rooms of both homes. To the children, King Louis, with his round face and wig reaching beyond his shoulders, was a person whom they expected to meet personally someday if they ever reached France.
The children were being raised to be good Catholics, loyal patriots and protectors of the king, and as such they represented the aspirations of ninety-nine out of a hundred citizens on their island. Their only enemies were the British, whose
nefarious behavior toward their island enraged them. In 1759, long before they were born, a British expeditionary force comprising many ships and thousands of soldiers had invaded Guadeloupe without reason and captured the western half of the butterfly; the British established a strong base and then attempted to conquer the eastern half, where the Lanzeracs and the Mornaixs of that time lived.
‘It took them about a year,’ Lanzerac Père explained to the children, ‘to accumulate their strength before they felt powerful enough to attack our part of the island, because they knew we Grande-Terre people were fighters, but in due course they came at us, and that was when your great-grandmother earned her place in the pantheon of French heroes.’ Whenever he reached this point in his narration he would pause dramatically and remind his listeners: ‘I said heroes, not heroines, for Grandmère Lanzerac was the equal of any man.’
What she did was to retreat into the Lanzerac storehouse out on the sugar plantation, bring all her slaves behind its walls, and arm them with guns collected from the other less formidable plantations, and there, as one British general recalled in his memoir of the campaign:
This remarkable old woman, sixty-seven and white-haired, supported only by her three sons and forty-one slaves, held back the entire might of the British invasion force. When I came upon the scene and asked: ‘What’s holding us up?’ my white-faced lieutenant replied: ‘There’s a damned old woman who won’t let us past her fort,’ and when I inspected this preposterous thing I saw he was correct. For our troops to get a foothold in Grande-Terre, they had to squeeze through the bottleneck that she commanded. And for two whole days we could not do it.