Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ I think much may arise out of it ultimately. This last Week has been a scene of Anxiety and fatigue beyond any I ever experienced … I am at present towing the Victory and the Admiral has just made the signal for me to go with her to Gibraltar … We have ten men killed and 37 Wounded, which is very trifling when compared to some of the other Ships, however we alone have certainly the whole credit of taking the Santissima Trinidada, who struck to us alone. Adml. Villeneuve was with me over two days, I found him a very pleasant and Gentlemanlike man, the poor man was very low! … This fatigue and employment has entirely driven away the bile and if poor Nelson had not been among the slain I should be most completely satisfied.

      His letter is dated ‘off Cadiz the 28th Oct. 1805’. He was right to be satisfied. By any other measure than a butcher’s bill the Neptune had acquitted herself heroically. ‘7 November,’ reads the ship’s log ten days later, as they made passage for Gibraltar: ‘Captain Fremantle read a letter of thanks from Vice Admiral Collingwood to all officers & men belonging to the Fleet for their conduct on the 21st Octo. Performed Divine Service & returned thanks to the Almighty God for the victory gained on the day.’ Frank Hastings would have done well to have forgotten his father’s atheism and joined in. At the age of just eleven he had survived the storm of the century and the greatest battle ever fought under sail. The next time – twenty-two years later at Navarino – there would be an action of similar proportions, his brilliance and daring would have gone a long way towards provoking it.

      III

      One of the great disappointments of Hastings’s story is that there is neither a portrait of the unusually small, fair-haired lad who had fought at Trafalgar, nor any surviving account from him of his part in the battle. It is clear from the Fremantle correspondence that Frank wrote an indignant protest at being sent below, but it would seem likely that his disappointed father destroyed that along with all his other letters in the aftermath of the Kangaroo incident, reducing his boy at one embittered stroke to a silent and anonymous role in all the great dramas of his early life.

      There is an unusually rich and varied archive to fill the gaps – captains’ letters, testimonials, Admiralty minutes, ships’ logs, tailors’ bills – but nothing quite makes up for the absence of Frank’s own voice. It is easy enough to follow the external outline of his career over the next six years, but the formative steps that operated on his genetic inheritance to transform him from the small frightened boy on the quarterdeck of Neptune into the commander of the Kangaroo remain frustratingly, elusively, out of reach.

      By the time one hears his own voice, the movement and rhythms of a man-of-war, the mouldering damp and discomfort, the proximity of death and violence, the chronic sleeplessness and brutal intimacy that were the universal experience of any young officer were so much a part of his nature that they pass unnoticed. In the youthful letters of a Peel or Goodenough there is a vivid sense of what it was like to be a boy at sea, but when Hastings finally emerges from his midshipman’s chrysalis it is as the finished product, as inured to the hardships and dangers of naval life as he is to the sense of wonder and curiosity that clearly once touched him.

      There are times, in fact – so complete is the absence of ‘colour’, so absolute the sense of purpose and concentration in his adult letters – when it feels as though one is following a man through a sensory desert. Over the last ten years of the Napoleonic Wars he served and fought from the China Seas to the Gulf of Mexico, yet one would no more know from Hastings what it felt like to be shipwrecked in the icy black waters off Halifax than how shattering it was to drag a massive naval gun through the swamps and bayous of New Orleans.

      The magical island fortresses of the Ligurian Sea, the baroque grandeur of Valetta, the feckless elegance of Nauplia’s Palamidi fortress, the harsh and brilliant clarity of the Cyclades, the romance of the Dardanelles, the numinous charge that attaches itself to the landscape of Greece – these were the background to his fighting life, but one would need one’s longitudes and latitudes to know it. It was not that Hastings was blind to either people or place – he was a naval officer trained to see and record – but where other men looked at modern Nafpaktos and saw historic Lepanto, Hastings looked at Lepanto and saw Nafpaktos; where other men saw the harbour from which the Argo sailed or the little ribbon of island on which Spartan soldiers first surrendered, Hastings saw only currents, breezes, lines of fire and anchorages.

      It cannot have been always so – he was too intelligent, too widely cultured, too well-liked, too much a man of the Age of Byron for that – and no such child can have excited the intense affection and dread with which family and friends awaited the news from Trafalgar. The first despatches from Collingwood had reached Falmouth after a voyage of only eight days, but for the families in the great houses, cottages, vicarages and deaneries that serviced the navy the arrival of the schooner Pickle signalled just the start of the waiting. ‘Thursday 7th Nov. I was much alarmed by Nelly’s ghastly appearance immediately after breakfast,’ Betsey Fremantle wrote in her journal, the day after Collingwood’s despatches reached London,

      who came in to say Dudley had brought from Winslow the account that a most dreadful action had been fought off Cadiz, Nelson & several Captains killed, & twenty ships were taken. I really felt undescribable misery until the arrival of the Post, but was relieved from such a wretched state of anxious suspense by a letter from Lord Garlies, who congratulated me on Fremantle’s safety & the conspicuous share he had in the Victory gained on the 21st off Cadiz … I fear the number of killed and wounded will be very great when the returns are sent. How thankful I am Fremantle has once more escaped unhurt. The accounts greatly shook my nerves.

      For the Hastings family, immured in the middle of the English countryside with their maps and their fears, the wait was still longer. ‘I should certainly not have delayed so long writing to you had I not so much leisure on my hands,’ Frank’s father at last wrote to Warren Hastings more than six weeks after the battle.

      Great inclination to oblige, frequent opportunities of doing it and a thorough conviction of its propriety, all this made the matter so easy that I never failed every morning at breakfast to declare my intention, always however determining to put it off to the last moment of the post, in order to send you news, which not coming, I thought it hardly worthwhile to trouble you, and so it went on until the glorious victory of Trafalgar was announced when my anxiety for your little protégé my son Frank only eleven years old who was on board the Neptune so damped my spirits, & absorbed every other consideration, as to render me unfit for any other thing, and it was not till about ten days ago that our minds were set at ease by the returns of the Neptune at last arriving, and also seeing a letter from my little Hero which completely dissipated every anxiety.

      The wait had put a strain on even his oldest and closest friendship – Lord Moira, thinking that Frank was with Cornwallis in the Channel had written flippantly to Charles Hastings – but when the news came everything was forgotten in the flood of relief and goodwill. ‘Most truly do I congratulate you,’ Moira wrote almost immediately again, ‘… on the safety of your Frank … When he comes to be prosing in his cane chair at Fourscore it will be a fine thing to have to boast of sharing the glory in the Battle of Trafalgar.’

      ‘My Dear General,’ wrote the Duke of Northumberland – another old soldier in the American Wars with a son in the navy,

      I have longed for some time to congratulate you on the English Victory gained over the combined fleets of France & Spain, but could not do so till I saw an authenticated List of the killed and wounded. Last night relieved me from my difficulties, & brought me the Gazette Extraordinary, & I now therefore take the earliest opportunity of writing to say how happy I am that my friend your youngster has had his share in so glorious a Victory unhurt. I hope he likes the Sea as well as ever, and flatter myself, He will in time prove another Lord Collingwood. I should have said Nelson but that I would prefer his being a Great Living Naval Character, СКАЧАТЬ