THE DURABLE MONUMENT (312 pp.)—Admiral Sir W. M. James—Longmans, Green ($4).
When the guns stopped firing off Cape Trafalgar in October 1805, a young seaman sat down and wrote to his father: “Our dear Admiral Nelson is killed! . . .
I never set eyes on him, for which I am both sorry and glad; for … all the men . . . who have seen him are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes, and cry, ever since he was killed—God bless you! Chaps that fought like the devil sit down and cry like a wench.”
Some such emotion has crept into the work of most biographers of Horatio Nelson, England’s No. 1 naval hero. Even the U.S.’s precise, levelheaded Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan allowed the legend of Nelson to skew up the accuracy of his portrait. British Admiral Sir W. M. James (who spent 18 months during World War
II working in an office aboard Nelson’s old flagship Victory) has tried to chart a sounder course. His seamanship may be better and his course truer, but when the voyage ends he has made the same port where other biographers have tied up. The Nelson who strides down the gangplanks of The Durable Monument is less legendary and more human than the Nelson of earlier biographies, but he is still the great captain of Britain’s long and memorable naval history.
Fortitude Interludes. Contrary to the common belief that Nelson was a “very delicate man,” the best evidence is that he was unusually robust. He had a morbid fear of serious illness, and it made him a self-centered hypochondriac; his letters swarmed with such remarks as: “I … venture to say [that] a very short space of time will send me to that bourne from which none return . . .” To most of his seamen he was the kindest, gentlest hero imaginable; to his Sea Lords he was exasperatingly ‘vindictive, suspicious and intolerant. He was as alarmingly unstable as a prima donna—until the moment he marched to the center of the stage and put on a priceless performance. The Nelson touch, says Admiral James, consisted of more than unorthodox audacities. Such naval details as supply, provision for his men, and overall shipshapeness were problems that he solved meticulously and with relish for every last detail.
But all Nelson’s fortitude and judgment, Admiral James sadly admits, fade from sight during the interludes on the Continent with his mistress, Emma Hamilton. “Antony and Moll Cleopatra” (as they were named by one onlooker) turned the courts of Vienna, Prague, Dresden and Naples (where husband Sir William Hamilton was ambassador) into uproar. Emma guzzled champagne and gambled with Nelson’s money. Nelson, down by the stern in an alcoholic sea, roared demands for songs in his own praise, and aged, cuckolded Hamilton, merry as a grig, “performed feats of activity, hopping around the room on his backbone, his arms, legs, star and ribbon all flying about in the air.”
The British Admiralty turned a blind eye to all this, so long as it took place on the Continent. But conservative officials were dismayed when Nelson took London by storm, flaunting like a battle-prize his lusty and pregnant mistress. Poor, respectable Lady Nelson took a brief look and fled. After a brilliant victory at the Battle of Copenhagen, Nelson set up house in the country, with the Hamiltons. Nelson himself seemed to be settling into the role of a country squire.
Trafalgar Trust. Many an Englishman decided then & there that Nelson would never put to sea again. But the Lords of the Admiralty knew better. One-eyed, one-armed, rheumatic and bubbling with enthusiasm, Nelson left bed and boudoir and pursued the French fleet with his old, extraordinary combination of “unexampled patience” and fanatical excitement. “Nelson confides that every man will do his duty” was his original cocky message to his fleet, but he “cordially approved” when an officer suggested that “England expects . . .” would be more to the point.
At Trafalgar, contrary to popular legend, he did not dress up in his showiest costume and expose himself on the most suicidal part of the deck. He merely wore his usual frock coat and quietly paced the upper deck—until a musketeer, lodged only 50 feet away in the rigging of the Redoubtable, shot him in the spine. Of the mass of tributes to Nelson, two stand out. One is that of a dying Trafalgar enemy, Spanish Admiral Gravina, who said: “I hope and trust that I am going to join the greatest hero the world almost ever produced.” The other is from Sir William Hamilton—that “strange man” who, by all the rules, should have been Nelson’s worst enemy, but who wrote instead: “God bless him, and shame fall on those who do not say amen!”
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