IX
NELSON

I am conscious of more difficulties ahead in beginning this sketch than I have felt with regard to any other of the series, for, while on the one hand it would be absurd to omit from the glorious ranks of our Empire-Makers the most glorious of them all, it is at the same time practically impossible to say anything fresh or even anything that is not very generally known about the man who, however much he may once have been slighted, and however inadequately his earlier services may have been rewarded during his life, has now come to be the idol of the country that he saved from invasion and the Empire that he preserved from destruction.

His life has been written and re-written, his character and his actions have been discussed and rediscussed, the most private acts and thoughts of his life have been dragged out into the full glare of publicity—a fate which any great man would have to be a very great sinner to deserve—but when all this has been said and done there remains a single, sharply-defined individuality of this incomparable naval captain whom the whole world now acknowledges and reveres, quite apart from all national considerations, as the greatest sailor who ever trod a deck and the greatest naval strategist who ever planned a battle or took a fleet into action.

It has been said that when a nation is on the brink of ruin the Fates either hasten its end or send some great man to restore its fortunes. It certainly was thus with the Britain of Nelson’s early youth. On the 17th of October, 1781, Lord Hawke, the victor of Quiberon Bay, and the last of the great line of seamen of whom Admiral Blake was the first, died, leaving, as Horace Walpole said the next day in the House of Commons, his mantle to nobody.

Apparently, there was no one worthy to wear it. The fortunes of England were indeed at a low ebb. Both her naval and military prestige had very seriously declined. The American colonies had been lost by the worst of statesmanship at home and the worst of bungling incompetence and cowardice abroad. We had been beaten by the raw colonists on land and by the French and Dutch at sea.

At home the very highest circles of the realm were polluted by such corruption and crippled by such imbecility as would be absolutely incredible to us now, Imagine, for instance, what would be thought to-day of the post of Secretary of State for War being given to a man who had been explicitly declared by a court martial to be absolutely incapable of serving his country in any military capacity!—and yet this is only one example out of many of the flagrant abuses of this amazingly disgraceful period.

Happily, however, for the honour of the race and the safety of the Empire there had been born, twenty-three years before to a country parson in Norfolk, a boy, the fifth in a family of eleven, who fourteen years later was destined to die in the moment of victory, happy in the knowledge that he had not left his country a single enemy to fight throughout the length and breadth of the High Seas. When Horace Walpole spoke his panegyric on Lord Hawke he would probably have been very much surprised if he had been told that it was this then insignificant and unknown cousin of his own who was not only to take up the mantle of the hero of Quiberon, but to bequeath it in his turn, not to a rival or a successor, but to the country which his last triumph left mistress of the seas.

Although there doesn’t seem to be any direct proof, it may be admitted that there is sufficiently strong presumption to warrant us in believing, if we choose to do so, that Horatio Nelson, son of the Rev. Edmund Nelson, Rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, could one way or another have traced a lineage back to the old Sea Kings of the North.

Certainly he must have had some of the blood of those who fought the Armada in his veins, and it is noteworthy that a Danish poet in celebrating his valour, wisdom, and clemency during and after the great battle of Copenhagen, attempted to soothe the wounded pride of his countrymen by pointing out that Nelson was indubitably a Danish name and that after all they had only been beaten by the descendant of one of their old Sea Kings.

But however this may be, the immediate facts all show that the man who crowned and completed the work which Francis Drake and his brother pirates began came of a stock that seemed to promise but little in the way of hereditary battle-winning.

Every one on his father’s side appears either to have been a parson or to have married one. His mother’s father was a parson too, but happily she had a brother Maurice who was a captain in the Navy, and had done some very good work at a time when good work was badly wanted.

This gallant sailor was a great grand-nephew of Sir John Suckling, the poet, and it may be noticed, in passing, that on the 21st of October, 1757, the day which we now know as the anniversary of Trafalgar—Captain Maurice Suckling in the Dreadnought, in company with two other sixty-gun ships, attacked seven large French men-of-war off Cape François in the West Indies, and gave them such a hammering that they were very thankful for the wind which enabled them to escape.

But still more noteworthy is the opinion of Captain Maurice Suckling of his nephew when he first received his father’s request to give him a place on board his ship.

“What,” he wrote in reply to the application, “has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon-ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.”

The weakness here somewhat grimly alluded to was the curse of Nelson’s existence from the day that he first set foot on the deck of a ship to the moment when the bullet from the mizen-top of the Redoubtable made his almost constant bodily suffering a matter of minutes.

His physical infirmities, or at any rate the weakness of his body as compared with the vast strength and tireless energy of his mind, bring him into very close relationship with William of Orange. Putting nationality aside, he was, in fact, on the sea what William was on land, and the central point in his policy was also the same—tireless and unsparing hostility to France.

With Nelson, indeed, this appears to have gone very near to the borders of fanaticism. Some of his sayings with regard to the Frenchmen of his day are absolutely ferocious. Hatred and contempt are about equally blended in them. “Hate a Frenchman as you would hate the devil!” was with him an axiom and was his usual form of advice to midshipmen on entering the service.

On one occasion in the Mediterranean he said to one of his captains who had got into a dispute about the property which the defeated French garrison at Gaieta were to be allowed to take away with them:

“I am sorry that you had any altercation with them. There is no way to deal with a Frenchman but to knock him down. To be civil to him is only to be laughed at when they are enemies.”

The same spirit breathes through nearly all his letters. Thus, for instance, he concluded a letter to the British Minister at Vienna with these words: “Down, down with the French ought to be written in the council-room of every country in the world, and may Almighty God give right thoughts to every sovereign is my constant prayer.”

He seems to have had respect for every other enemy that he met; but for the French he had nothing save contemptuous and unsparing hostility. “Close with a Frenchman, but out-manœuvre a Russian” was another of his favourite sayings. This, it is to be hoped, is all past and gone; but it is instructive as giving us the key, not only to Nelson’s policy, but also to that spirit which made the British man-of-warsmen of the day absolutely prefer to fight the French at long odds than on even terms.

It was this spirit which was embodied in another of Nelson’s pet phrases: “Any Englishman is worth three Frenchmen.” Of course that would be all nonsense now; but in justice to our neighbours it ought to be remembered that the Frenchmen whom Nelson and his sailors met and conquered were the worst and not the best of their nation.

The old navy of France, the navy which had commanded the Eastern Seas in the days of Clive and which had with impunity insulted the English shores and brought an invading force into Ireland in the time of William the Third no longer existed. It had been essentially an aristocratic service like our own, its officers were gentlemen and thorough sailors, and its seamen were brave, disciplined, and obedient.

But in her blood-drunkenness France had either murdered or banished nearly every man who was fit to command a ship or who knew how to point a gun. The fleets of revolutionary France were for the most part commanded by ignoramuses or poltroons, or both, and manned by a rabble who had neither stamina, training, or discipline.

Without the slightest wish to detract from the splendour of the victories of Nelson or his comrades, I still think it is only fair to point out again, as has once or twice been done before, that when we read of French Admirals declining battle even when they had superior force, or of running away before the battle was over, or of a small British squadron crumpling up a whole fleet with very trifling loss to itself, we ought to remember that the French Admirals had little or no confidence in their officers, while the officers had still less either in their admirals or their men.

On the other hand, such a man as Nelson, Collingwood, or Hardy had simply to say that he was going to do a certain thing to convince every one serving under him that it was about as good as already done.

This brings me naturally to one of Nelson’s most striking characteristics. No man who rose to distinction in the Navy was ever guilty of so many barefaced acts of insubordination as he was. Happily for him and for us his disobedience or neglect of orders was always justified by victory. The genius for supreme command, which was far and away the strongest point in his character, manifested itself very early in his career. The event proved that he was the superior of every naval officer then afloat, whether admiral or midshipman, and he seemed instinctively to know it.

When he was commanding the old Agamemnon in the Mediterranean, at the time when it was in dispute whether Corsica should fall under the rule of France or Britain, he fought two French ships, the Ça Ira and the Sans Culottes, for a whole day and beat them. The next day a sort of general action was fought, Admiral Hotham being in command of the British fleet. Nelson naturally wanted a fight to a finish, but the Admiral was content with the capture of two ships and the flight of the rest, and in reply to Nelson’s remonstrances he said: “We must be contented. We have done very well.”

In a letter home on the subject of this action, Nelson penned a sentence which was at once prophetic in itself and closely characteristic of the writer. It was this: “I wish to be an Admiral and in command of the English fleet. I should very soon either do much or be ruined. My disposition cannot bear tame and slow measures. Sure I am had I commanded on the 14th, that either the whole French fleet would have graced my triumph or I should have been in a confounded scrape.”

That is Nelson’s mental portrait drawn by himself. No half measures would ever do for him, and in most of the letters that he sent home from his various scenes of action, whether they were written to his wife, his private friends, or the Lords of the Admiralty, we find the constant complaint, made with an insistence amounting almost to petulance, that when he saw complete triumph within his grasp his superiors either would not help him to secure it or forced him to be content with a mere temporary advantage.

Under such circumstances it was only natural that such a man should now and then break loose. He saw quite plainly that there were confused councils at home, and timid tactics afloat. He saw also that under Napoleon the power of France was growing every day.

The Board of Admiralty was apparently both corrupt and incompetent. The Mediterranean fleet had been so shamefully neglected that after Nelson had fought an action off Toulon even he was afraid to risk another without the certainty of victory because there was “not so much as a mast to be had east of Gibraltar,” and he could not possibly have re-fitted his ships. It was about this time that he said in one of his letters home:

“I am acting, not only without the orders of my commander-in-chief, but in some measure contrary to him.”

If the authorities at home had only had the same opinion of his abilities as those had who were able to watch his operations on the spot, and particularly in Italy, it is quite possible that the whole history of Europe might have been changed and that Napoleon would never have won that series of brilliant victories which cost such an infinity of blood and treasure, and which bore no fruits but such as resembled all too closely the fabled Dead Sea apples.

Nelson’s patriotism may have been of a somewhat narrow-minded order, and his hatred of the French may have partaken somewhat of the nature of bigotry, but there can be no doubt that he was the one man in Europe who saw what was coming and had the ability, if he had only had the power, to save the world from the horrors of the Napoleonic wars.

Thus, for instance, if his advice had been taken, the splendid victory of Aboukir Bay might have been turned into the decisive battle of the war which only ended with Waterloo. As it was, he to some extent took the law into his own hands. He saw perfectly well that Napoleon’s ultimate point of attack was not Egypt but India. He sent an officer with dispatches to the Governor of Bombay, advising him of the defeat of the French Fleet, and in this dispatch he said:

“I know that Bombay was their first object if they could get there, but I trust that now Almighty God will overthrow in Egypt these pests of the human race. Buonaparte has never yet had to contend with an English officer, and I shall endeavour to make him respect us.”

In another dispatch to the Admiralty he taught a lesson which we have only lately begun to learn. In those days of the old wooden-walls the handy, light-heeled frigate was to the ships of the line what the swift cruisers of to-day are to the big battleships. They were the eyes and ears of the fleet, and they could be sent on errands which were impossible to the huge three-deckers. After the battle of the Nile was won he said in this dispatch:

“Were I to die this moment want of frigates would be found stamped on my heart. No words of mine can express what I have suffered, and am suffering, for want of them.”

The inner meaning of these bitter words was one of vast importance, not only to Britain, but to all Europe. They meant really that the most splendid victory that had so far been won at sea had been robbed of half its results. For want of the lighter craft, even of a few bomb-vessels and fire-ships which he had implored the authorities to send him, Napoleon’s store-ships and transports in the harbour of Alexandria escaped attack and certain destruction.

Their destruction would have enabled Nelson to carry out the policy which his genius had told him was the only true one to pursue at this momentous crisis. He would have cut off Napoleon’s communications and deprived him of his supplies. Then he would have blockaded the Egyptian Coast and left the future conqueror of Austerlitz to perish amidst the sands of Egypt. As he said to himself: “To Egypt they went with their own consent, and there they shall remain while Nelson commands this squadron—for never, never will he consent to the return of one ship or Frenchman. I wish them to perish in Egypt and give an awful lesson to the world of the justice of the Almighty.”

This was a pitiless pronouncement, but no one who has read the history of the Napoleonic wars can doubt the accuracy of Nelson’s foresight or the true humanity of his policy, for, if this had happened only a few thousands out of the five million lives which these wars are computed to have cost would have been lost. There would have been no Austerlitz, or Wagram, or Jena for France to boast of; but, on the other hand, there would have been no Leipsic, no Moscow, and no Waterloo.

As usual, however, Nelson, although he had magnificently restored the credit of the British arms at sea, was crippled by shortness of means and baulked by the stupidity and incompetence of his masters at home. Sir Sidney Smith’s policy was preferred to his, with the result that Napoleon was permitted to desert his army and live to become the curse of Europe for the next seventeen years.

But, if he did not do all he wanted to do, when Nelson won the battle of the Nile he completely established his claim to be considered one of the Empire-makers of Britain, for if he had not followed the French with that unerring judgment of his, and if he had not, in defiance of all accepted naval tactics, attacked them in what was considered to be an unassailable position—that is to say, moored off shore in two lines with both ends protected by batteries—all the work that Clive and Hastings had done in India might have been undone, and, considering the miserable state of our national defences, we might either have lost India or had to wage such an exhausting war for it that we could not possibly have taken the decisive share that we afterwards did in the overthrow of the French power.

As he said in one of his most famous utterances while the British fleet was streaming into the bay: “Where there is room for a Frenchman to swing, there is room for an Englishman to get alongside him.”

That was Nelson. His idea was always to get alongside, to get as close as possible to the enemy and to hit him as hard as he could. Mere defeat was not enough for him. He wanted a fight to a finish, the finish being the absolute destruction or capture of the hostile force.

This was not because there was anything particularly ferocious in his nature. On the contrary, a more tender-hearted man never lived.

Before that one defeat of his at Teneriffe when he lost his arm, he wrote to his Commander-in-chief—this letter, by the way, was the last he ever wrote with his right hand—expressing solicitude for everybody but himself. None knew better than he the desperate nature of the venture, for in this very letter he said that on the morrow his head would probably be crowned either with laurel or cypress, and the last thing he did before he left his ship was to call his stepson to help him in burning his wife’s letters, and then ordered him to remain behind, saying: “Should we both fall, what would become of your poor mother?”

Happily Lieutenant Nisbet disobeyed the order to his face and went. When the bullet shattered Nelson’s arm at the elbow, it was his stepson who had the presence of mind to whip off his silk handkerchief and bind it round above the wound. But for this, Nelson would never have fought another battle, for he must have bled to death before he reached his ship.

It so happened that he could have been put much sooner on board the Sea Horse, but her commander, Captain Freemantle, was still on shore, and, for all he knew, might be dead or alive. His wife was on board the Sea Horse, and Nelson, wounded and bleeding as he was, insisted on going on, saying: “I would rather suffer death than alarm Mrs. Freemantle by letting her see me in this state when I can give her no tidings of her husband.” Freemantle, as it turned out, had been wounded in almost exactly the same place only a few minutes before.

When Nelson got back to his own ship, he would not hear of being slung or carried up on deck.

“I’ve got one arm and two legs left,” he said, “and I’ll get up by myself.”

And so he did, and up a single rope at that. In a strong man this would have been wonderful; in a mere weakling as Nelson physically was, it was little short of a miracle.

This was the man who, in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, with an utterly disabled ship, boarded and took two Spanish men-of-war both bigger than his own. One of them had eighty and the other a hundred and twelve guns; his own only mounted seventy-four.

It is, of course, entirely out of the question that in such a mere sketch as this I should attempt to follow Nelson through even a moderate proportion of the hundred and five engagements in which he personally fought, nor would it be fitting that I should attempt to emulate the brilliant and detailed descriptions which have illustrated the principal of them.

With his doings at Naples and Palermo, and his much-debated and inexplicable attachment to Lady Hamilton which unhappily began during this period, we have here no concern. The hero of the Nile, like every other great man, had his faults. Those who cavil at them are really blaming their possessors for not being perfect, for if really great men had no faults they would be perfect, and that is impossible, and, so much being said, the scene may now shift forthwith from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.

The Armed Neutrality is now only a phrase in history, but in the year 1801 it was a very serious reality. It was a league between Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. From the English point of view it meant this—that France, with whom we had now practically embarked in a struggle to the death, would be able, under the sanction of this league, to import from the shores of the Baltic the very articles that we did not wish her to have, and which she couldn’t get elsewhere. These were naval stores, pine-trees for masts and spars, hemp for rigging, tar, and so on.

It was very easy to see that this Armed Neutrality meant in plain English that these three Powers were quite agreeable to the smashing-up of Great Britain by France provided that they were not called upon to pay any of the expenses or suffer any of the other losses of the war. Denmark was therefore politely but firmly requested to detach herself from this league, the reason being that Denmark in those days kept the key of the Baltic. Denmark refused, and unhappily for her she did so just at the time when the Victor of the Nile had come home for a well-earned holiday.

We are not accustomed now, in the pride of our unequalled naval strength, to take very much account of the fleets of these three countries, but just before the Battle of the Baltic was fought it was a very different matter.

The Danes had twenty-three line-of-battle ships and thirty-one frigates, not counting bomb-vessels and guard-ships. Sweden had eighteen ships of the line, fourteen frigates and sloops and seventy-four galleys, as well as a small swarm of gun-boats, while Russia could put to sea eighty-two line-of-battle ships and forty-two frigates.

Such a force within the narrow waters of the Baltic was a very formidable one, but before we can arrive at a just appreciation of the magnificence and importance of the service which Nelson did for his country we must remember that of all European waters those of the Baltic, and especially of the approaches to it, are the most difficult and dangerous. Even with the aid of steam it would be no light matter to take a fleet into the Baltic under the guns of Elsinore and Kronberg were the lamps of the lighthouses extinguished and all the buoys removed.

What then must it have been to go in with a fleet of sailing ships utterly at the mercy of wind and current, to say nothing of the ice? Indeed, Southey tells us that when Nelson went to Yarmouth to join the fleet under Admiral Sir Hyde-Parker he found him a little nervous about dark nights and ice-floes.

His own remarks on the subject are very well worthy of remembrance: “These are not times for nervous systems,” he said. “I hope we shall give our northern enemies that hailstorm of bullets which gives our dear country the dominion of the sea. We have it and all the devils in the North cannot take it from us if our wooden walls have fair play.”

It was a most egregious mistake not to have made the Victor of the Nile and the Conqueror of the Mediterranean commander-in-chief of the Northern Squadron. His fame was already resounding through the world, and every one except the Lords of the Admiralty seems to have already recognised the fact that he was by far the finest sailor of the age.

Here again, too, officialism at home sadly crippled the work of valour and genius abroad. As usual Nelson had his own plans, and as usual they were the very best possible. His idea was to attack the Russian Squadron in Reval and the Danish in Copenhagen simultaneously, and by preventing their coalition make it too risky for the Swedes to join in.

Captain Mahan, who is certainly entitled to be considered one of the foremost naval authorities of the day, describes Nelson’s plan of attack as worthy of Napoleon himself, and says that if adopted it “would have brought down the Baltic Confederacy with a crash that would have resounded throughout Europe.” As it was, more timid counsels prevailed, but thanks to Nelson the end was the same, or nearly so.

We may gather some notion of the difficulty of getting on to the scene of battle when we read that no less than three English line-of-battle ships went aground before the battle began, and we also get an interesting glimpse of that old hand-to-hand style of naval warfare which has now passed away for ever, when we are told that the ships opened fire at a range of two hundred yards! Nowadays firing would begin at between three and four thousand. If two modern fleets were to get to business at that range the said business would probably consist of one broadside from each, one discharge of the big guns, and after that general wreck and ruin. It is not likely that either side would win, and it is certain that both sides would lose.

From ten to one the battle raged fast and furious, and so much damage had been done on the English side that Sir Hyde-Parker made a signal to leave off action. It was at this moment that Nelson uttered those immortal words, which were destined to be as famous even as his signal at Trafalgar:

“What? Leave off action? No, damn me if I do! You know, Foley, I have a right to be blind sometimes. No, I really don’t see the signal. Fire away!”

Those were days of hard swearing as well as hard hitting, and, considering all the circumstances, even the purest of modern purists may forgive a little vehemence of expression to the man who that day did such good work, not only for our grandfathers, but for us and our children.

An hour or so later Nelson performed one of the most memorable actions even of his life. The Danish ships and floating batteries were moored in-shore. The fire of the English guns was, as usual, terribly accurate, but as fast as the Danes were shot down, fresh crews were put on board the ships, and Nelson very soon saw that this simply meant butchery as long as a Danish ship floated.

Consequently he sat down and wrote a note to the Crown Prince of Denmark which he sent on shore under a flag of truce. This was the letter:

“Lord Nelson has directions to spare Denmark when no longer resisting, but if the firing is continued on the part of Denmark, Lord Nelson will be obliged to set on fire all the floating batteries he has taken without having the power of saving the brave Danes who have defended them.”

The result of this letter was a truce, and the truce led to an armistice and the separation of Denmark from the Armed Neutrality. This was very different treatment, we may well imagine, to anything that the French might have expected. In their case he considered extermination to be the only remedy for the disease which in his eyes they represented on earth.

It was curious that after such a day’s work this man, who had probably saved Europe from one of the greatest menaces that ever threatened it, should go back to his cabin and copy out love verses to send to Lady Hamilton—and yet that is just what he did, and at the end of them he wrote: “St. George, April 2nd, 1801, at 9 o’clock at night. Very tired after a hard fought battle.”

The Battle of Copenhagen and the death of the Tsar Paul put an end to the Northern Confederacy and to all the hopes of France in that direction. But Nelson was not satisfied, for the Russian fleet had escaped. He was, however, in some measure consoled by the recall of Sir Hyde-Parker and the realisation of his old ambition by his own appointment as commander-in-chief.

His next service was as commander of a sort of patrol fleet on the East Coast. Those were the days of the great invasion scare. Nelson never believed in it. In one of his letters to Lord Addington on the subject he said:

“What a forlorn undertaking! It is perfectly right to be prepared against a mad government, but with the active force your lordship has given me I may pronounce it impracticable.”

Soon after this, preliminaries of peace were signed, and to Nelson’s intense disgust the French Ambassador was enthusiastically received in London. Writing to his physician soon after he said:

“Can you cure madness? for I am mad that our damned scoundrels dragged the Frenchman’s carriage. I am ashamed for my country.”

The Peace was hollow and brief, for the mastery of the sea was not yet decided, and by the middle of 1803 we find Nelson back in the Mediterranean, not blockading Toulon, but rather trying to tempt the French out to a battle.

He even went so far as to appear to run away, and the French Admiral, Latouche-Treville, promptly wrote a letter giving a most glowing account of how he had chased the English away from Toulon. The idea of a Frenchman daring to say such a thing naturally made Nelson furious. Writing about it to his brother he said:

“If this fleet gets fairly up with M. Latouche his letter with all his ingenuity must be different from his last. We had fancied that we had chased him into Toulon, but from the time of his meeting Captain Hawker of the Isis I never heard of his acting otherwise than as a poltroon and a liar. I am keeping his letter, and if I take him by God he shall eat it.”

This amiable design, however, the French Admiral baulked by dying, and when Nelson heard the news he remarked half-angrily: “He is gone, and all his lies with him.”

That is what he thought of the Admiral. This is what he thought of the fleet: “The French fleet yesterday was to appearance in high feather and as fine as paint could make them. Our weather-beaten ships, I have no fear, will make their sides like a plum-pudding.”

The interval between the ending of the Toulon blockade and the Battle of Trafalgar was filled chiefly by what may be described as a huge naval hunt. On the one hand, there were three French fleets manœuvring to get out and come together in the Channel with the object of overwhelming any English force that might try to prevent the embarkation of the Grand Army at Boulogne. But they had another object, and that was to get as far as possible out of Nelson’s way.

The first idea was to make a feint at the West Indies, and so away went Admiral Villeneuve with his fleet across the Atlantic, and away went Nelson post-haste after him. He got to the West Indies only to find that the Frenchmen had doubled on their tracks and gone back again, and so he immediately turned the prows of his weather-beaten and almost unseaworthy ships to the eastward, and for the second time chased the French across the Atlantic. But he missed them again, and on July 20, 1805, Nelson made an entry in his diary to the effect that he had that day gone ashore at Gibraltar—the first time that he had left the Victory for two years all but ten days!

From Gibraltar he came home and spent a few weeks of rest at Merton, the estate which he had bought in Surrey. During this time a momentous naval duel was fought in the Channel. Admiral Villeneuve had sent some very important dispatches containing the plans for the concentration of the French and Spanish fleets to the commander of the Rochefort squadron by the Didon, a forty-four-gun frigate; but on her way the Didon was met by the Phœnix, an English forty-gun frigate which, after the fashion of the times, proceeded to pound her to helplessness, then ran alongside and carried her by the board in the good old style. The result of this was that Villeneuve gave up all hope of the concentration and retreated to Cadiz, where he anchored on August 17th.

Admiral Collingwood, in command of the Atlantic squadron, at once sent off the frigate Euryalus home with news. She dropped anchor at Spithead on the 1st of September. At five o’clock the next morning her captain presented himself at Merton and found Nelson already up and dressed. The moment Captain Blackwood entered the room Nelson’s face lit up and he said:

“I’m sure you bring me news of the French and Spanish fleets and I think I shall have to give them a beating yet. Depend upon it, Blackwood, I shall yet give Mr. Villeneuve a drubbing.”

He left for London the same day to consult with the Admiralty, and it was on one of the visits that he then paid to the Secretary of State that he met for a few minutes—and for the only time in his life—the man whose name was destined to be linked with his in everlasting fame. This was Arthur Wellesley, some day to be Duke of Wellington, who was to do for the French on land what Nelson had been doing for them at sea.

Sir Arthur came away with a curious opinion of the little, pale, nervous, fidgety, one-armed man, who had won the two greatest battles in the history of naval warfare, and was about to surpass himself by winning yet a greater one.

From one point of view he was a vain, boastful, and somewhat womanish little man. From another, he was not only a great leader of men, but a statesman to boot. On the whole, the future Iron Duke came to the conclusion that the Hero of the Nile was “a very superior person.”

Nelson’s opinion of Wellington is unhappily lost to posterity. One can imagine the sort of language he would have used if any one had told him that a soldier had ventured to call him “a superior person.”

“For charity’s sake, send us Lord Nelson, ye men of power.” Such was the prayer of Captain Codrington of the Orion, serving with Collingwood’s fleet off Cadiz. But by the time this letter got home Nelson was with the fleet, and it is worthy of note that he reached the last and most glorious of his hundred battlefields on his birthday, the twenty-ninth of September.

The first thing that he did was to send home for more ships, not because he wasn’t ready to fight the French with what he had, but simply in pursuance of his constant policy with regard to them. In his dispatch to the Admiralty he said:

“Should they come out, I shall immediately bring them to battle, but though I should not doubt of spoiling any voyage they may attempt, yet I hope for the arrival of the ships from England that as an enemy’s fleet they may be annihilated.”

In a private letter which he wrote at the same time he said:

“It is annihilation that the country wants and not merely a splendid victory of twenty-three to thirty-six—honourable to the parties concerned, but absolutely useless in the extended scale to bring Buonaparte to his marrow-bones. Numbers can only annihilate. Therefore I hope the Admiralty will send the fixed force as soon as possible.”

He hoped for forty sail of the line, but when the ever memorable morning of the 21st had dawned he was only able to muster twenty-seven against thirty-three. At half-past eleven the famous signal: “England expects that every man will do his duty!” flew from the main-royal of the Victory.

I have no intention of attempting to re-write the thousand-times told tale of Trafalgar or of the disaster which plunged the nation into mourning in the midst of the exultation of triumph, for to do so would be alike superfluous and impertinent. Let it be enough to point out that the firing of the first gun marked the moment that Nelson had lived and fought for.

He was Commander-in-chief, as he had so often prayed to be, of the British Fleet, and there in front of him was the last fleet of any strength that his hated enemy France could muster. The battle, like the triumph, was his and his alone. Every man who that day did his duty fought by Nelson’s directions and, as it were, under Nelson’s eye, and never was victory more complete or defeat more crushing.

When it was over eighteen out of the thirty-three French and Spanish ships had been captured, and finally only eleven got back to Cadiz so shattered that they never again took the sea as men-of-war.

The crowning triumph of Nelson’s life left Britain without a rival so far as the mastery of the sea was concerned and threw the way open for conquest and colonisation in all parts of the world. Well might the great Admiral say when he lay dying in Captain Hardy’s arms: “Thank God, I’ve done my duty!”

No man ever died with nobler or more truly spoken words on his lips than these, for he had not only given his country the empire of the sea, but he had saved her from invasion by one who was perhaps the greatest military genius the world has known.

On the heights above Boulogne there stands a tall column surmounted by a figure of Napoleon. It was raised to commemorate the assembly of the Grand Army—that army which during the next ten years swept in an irresistible torrent of conquest from one end of Europe to the other. Napoleon’s back is turned on the white cliffs of England. If Nelson had never lived, he might have been facing the other way.