Nelson (17 page)

But he could no longer prevaricate and reported the incident to Commodore Hughes. There was a swift response from that capable officer. On the evening of 25 April Drummond was arrested and suspended from duty. When the ships eventually reached Madras he was court-martialled on board the
Salisbury
on 30 May. For some reason a charge of inhumanity was deemed unproven; perhaps the court thought that one or two incidents did not warrant a conviction, or that Farmer himself had set a bad example to an inexperienced lieutenant. Anyway, indictments for drunkenness and disobedience were carried and Drummond was dismissed the service – the first officer Nelson saw disgraced in that way.

Unfortunately, Drummond was not an isolated case. A replacement, promoted on 5 June, was sent to the
Seahorse
, but Thomas Henery was little improvement. The same patterns of misbehaviour began to reappear and it is difficult not to believe that Farmer was somehow to blame.

For Horace Nelson, able seaman and sentinel, the gossip about Drummond was merely one facet of a diverse learning experience. He continued to stand by the master’s side when the observations were made each day at noon, profiting from Surridge’s endless curiosity. As the
Seahorse
bowled northwards under the influence of the southeast trade winds, the master scrupulously pondered the interplay of wind and current. ‘This day the current had set the ship nine miles to the Northwest of the reckoning,’ he wrote on 6 May, ‘and the weather, which before was cloudy with frequent squalls, became serene with very smooth water; and, as the wind continues steady, I suppose we must have advanced into the southwest monsoon.’ The next day the ship seemed to be as much as sixteen miles northwest of the reckoning, and Surridge concluded that the current was pushing them westwards of Ceylon, when they were purposing to pass east of it to Madras. He therefore hauled the ship up to get around Ceylon, and put into Madras road on 16 May. We know that young Nelson absorbed these lessons well. Fourteen years later he warned Cornwallis that the Indian Ocean currents in April to June could confound reckonings so much that ships fancying themselves east or north of Ceylon could actually be around about the Maldives, to the southwest, or even on the Malabar coast of India.
¹⁵

Horace found Madras hot, wet and throbbing. It was one of the three principal outposts of the East India Company, the legendary fraternity that still controlled Britain’s rich eastern trade in Indian cottons, muslins, tea and oriental spices. The company was mired in debts and peculation, propped up by loans and bedevilled by internal unrest in the subcontinent, but to youngsters such as Nelson, raised on romanticised tales of Clive’s victories, it represented fabled wealth and excitement. Certainly sweltering Madras was busy. Ships were plentiful. The
Northumberland
was still there, flying the flag of Rear Admiral Sir Robert Harland, who was waiting to hand the East Indies squadron over to Hughes before heading for England with some of his ships. Others came and went, exchanging salutes as they did so, naval vessels such as the
Buckingham
,
Warwick
and
Dolphin
, and British, Dutch and French Indiamen. Boats rushed here and there
shipping supplies or transporting officers to and from meetings with the commodore, and guns from Fort St George, a garrison of the East India Company, and the garden of the Nabob of Arcot added to the constant thunder that heralded the exits and entrances.

The navy had disciplinary matters to resolve. Drummond’s career disintegrated in the cabin of the
Salisbury
, while on 3 June the ferocious punishment reserved for serious cases of desertion was meted out to three men of the same ship. To a sinister drumbeat the prisoners were ‘flogged around the fleet’, rowed from ship to ship to receive twenty-five lashes alongside each. Nelson remembered poor Smith of the
Triumph
, but the two hundred strokes each of these men received exceeded any punishment he had seen.

Before the end of the year Horace met another hazard of the tropical service, disease. Harland left for home on 20 July, and after the
Salisbury
and the
Seahorse
had been refitted and provisioned, Hughes took them back to sea with the
Dolphin
. They sailed north to Kedgeree in the Hooghly River in September. There was little of interest there – a few houses, a small sandy bay, and a trio of merchantmen riding at anchor – and sickness increased the discomfort. Two men on the
Seahorse
died and twenty-three had to be carried ashore to a hospital. On this occasion all the invalids appear to have been retrieved before the ship left for the return journey to Madras on 16 January 1775, but these were climes and conditions to which Europeans were little accustomed and death by disease was a continuing concern.

For the moment Nelson seemed immune. As his teens advanced the frailty of his earliest years diminished, and away from the marshy, damp atmosphere of the Norfolk coast his frame and constitution toughened. With Surridge to turn to in difficulty, and Troubridge and Hoare to share boyish foolishness, these years were good ones for Nelson, if not for British India.

The subcontinent was in chaos. The old Moghul empire based on Delhi had collapsed and everywhere resurgent Hindu powers fought over the bones. Bloodshed, murder and intrigue were rife. To protect their trade amidst such turmoil, the East India Company’s ‘presidencies’ at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were reluctantly drawn into expensive entanglements with various Indian princes, and took direct control of Bengal and part of the Coromandel coast. Particularly
worrying to the British were the Mahrattas, who controlled a huge swath of northern and central India, and Haidar Ali, the ruler of Mysore on the Malabar coast south of Goa. The Mahrattas had already expelled the Portuguese from Bassein and the island of Salsette near Bombay, and seemed destined to clash with the troublesome British.

This delicate situation, as well as the possibility of a return of the French humbled by Clive less than twenty years before, kept a small squadron of the Royal Navy on station. It had various duties to fulfil. Hughes himself sailed from Kedgeree to escort transports to Calcutta and to confer with Warren Hastings, the crown’s new governor general in Bengal. The
Seahorse
was careened at Kedgeree, heeled over against a frame so that the bottom could be scrubbed clean of barnacles, seaweed and infestation, and then also left, bound on East India Company business. For Horace, who had spent more than four years in a peacetime navy, the assignment brought a new experience – his first taste of battle.

Eighty-nine boxes of company rupees were lowered into the dark hold of the
Seahorse
before Farmer returned to Madras for orders. There the
Seahorse
was instructed to ship the treasure to Bombay on the west coast, and to offer support to its governor and council. There had been talk of a Portuguese expedition leaving Goa to recapture Bassein and Salsette from the Mahrattas. If anything frightened the East India Company more than Hindu princes, it was European rivals, and to pre-empt any Portuguese action the British had seized the disputed areas themselves. Naturally, the Mahrattas were furious and retaliation was expected. The company clamoured for naval protection.
¹⁶

Consequently, the
Seahorse
made its first appearance on the west coast of India, putting into Anjenga road on 15 February 1775, just in time to witness a three-hour partial eclipse of the moon. Moving northwards along the coast, they reached latitude nine degrees forty-six minutes, near the southern fringes of the coastal state of Mysore, ruled by Haidar Ali. It was Sunday 19 February, calm but hazy. Captain Farmer’s log tells the story of Nelson’s first ever skirmish:

At 5 AM weighed and made sail. At 7 saw two sail standing towards us, which we imagined to be Bombay [Company?] cruisers. At 1/2 past 7 they hauled their wind to the southward, and stood after the
Dodley
[a ‘country ship in company’ since the previous evening] and hoisted Hadir Aly’s colours.
We immediately tacked, and stood after them. At 8 fired several shot to bring one of them to, thinking her to be a Marratta. At 9 one of the [enemy] ketches sent her boat on board us, and told us they belonged to Hadir Aly, but as the [other] ketch did not bring to, nor shorten sail, and several other vessels [were] heaving in sight, which we imagined to be [enemy] consorts, we kept firing round and grape shot at her until noon. Broke 6 panes [of] glass in chase. At 1/2 past noon the ketch brought to, and struck her colours. We hoisted out the cutter, and sent her with an officer on board, who found her to be one of Hadir Aly’s armed cruisers. At 1/2 past 2 PM hoisted the cutter in and made sail. Upon examining the shot racks, and the grape shot which were hung under the quarter deck, we found that we fired at the above vessel fifty-seven round shot, nine pounders; fifteen grape shot, nine pounders; two double-headed hammered shot, nine pounders; twenty-five round shot, three pounders; and two grape shot, three pounders.
¹⁷

Lively as the exchange was, it merely punctuated Farmer’s important mission north and he reached Bombay almost a month later on 16 March. The news had improved. It appeared that the Mahrattas had no plans to recover Bassein and Salsette by force, and that they were about to conclude an armistice with the East India Company. Indeed, the supreme council of the company had sent a plenipotentiary to the Mahratta capital, Poona, and it was expected that Salsette would be yielded without violence. This is, in fact, what happened. By playing one faction among the Mahrattas against the other, the company secured Salsette in 1776 by the treaty of Purandhar.
¹⁸

At Bombay, Horace saw an astonishingly spacious and beautiful haven, with a lighthouse, fort, dry dock and church, but the combined efforts of the navy and the company kept him busy. The rupees were unloaded and two detachments of the company’s troops with an artillery train embarked for Surat road, further north. However, while Farmer was effectively an arm of the company, he maintained the privileges and status of the Royal Navy. When a company ketch flew the broad pendant of a commodore in Surat road, Farmer decided that a prerogative of his commander-in-chief had been breached. He fired a swivel gun at the vessel and sent one of his officers on board to remove the offending object.

Now for the first time in his life Nelson experienced the prolonged frustrations of one of the least popular but most common duties of the naval officer. Convoy work. Waiting for merchantmen to gather, shepherding them from one place to another, keeping them together,
moving forward stragglers and cruising ahead or on the flanks to intercept enemies was nearly always calculated to raise the blood pressure. It was often a distraction from the more exciting and profitable work of chasing prizes. On this occasion there were compensations, for these were new seas and scenes to Nelson. The
Seahorse
proceeded northwest across the Arabian Sea to Muscat, and then with the
Betsy Galley
through the Strait of Hormuz and along the Persian Gulf to Bushire. On 24 May they ran into Bushire road to clean, refit and provision. The local sheik was entertained aboard as well as the head of the English trade factory at Bussorah, who had been driven from his town by a war between the Turks and the Persians.

If we may believe Nelson’s account, during this time he was much in the foretop, from where he was well positioned to spot potential dangers. On the voyage to Bushire, for example, a large area of discoloured water was seen in the path of the ship off ‘Cape Verdeston’ on 22 May. It was taken to be shallows, and while the
Seahorse
shortened sail a cutter went ahead to investigate, only to discover that the focus of their interest was an immense shoal of fish spawn. Coming back from Bushire to Bombay, life in the foretop largely consisted of keeping convoys under surveillance in the generally hazy weather.

It was important work, for the convoy was typically unmanageable. The
Seahorse
sailed from Bushire on 16 July with a party consisting of the
Eagle
, an armed snow belonging to the East India Company; the aforementioned
Betsy Galley
and another ‘country’ ship, the
Fatty Eloy
; the
Betsy
schooner; and two ketches, the
Euphrates
and the
Tigris
. Making along the coast, the ships soon got separated and when the
Seahorse
reached Muscat on 30 July only the
Euphrates
was still in company. Fortunately, some of the others had already made the harbour, and the balance came in shortly afterwards. The journey was resumed on 6 August, with the ketches replaced by a ship named the
Indian Queen
. The
Fatty Eloy
proved herself to be a sluggish sailor, and acted as a drag on the convoy, and after satisfying himself that the ships were in no particular danger, Farmer urged them to make more sail and forged on ahead. He reached Bombay with only the
Betsy Galley
in company on 15 August and the remainder of his charges strung out behind.

The voyage from Bushire to Bombay had given Able Seaman Nelson his first full taste of the fretful drudgery of convoy duty, though the foretop protected him from the petty annoyances that worried his seniors below. Not all the frustrations related to the everyday vexations
of sailing a ship of war and herding merchantmen, for fresh personnel problems were surfacing under Farmer’s troubled command.

On 28 July the captain had received a written complaint from the gunner, George Middleton, charging Lieutenant Thomas Henery with various offences, including tyrannical behaviour. Henery responded sharply. Although others stood ready to support the gunner’s stories, he said Middleton was ‘a lying good for nothing’. When the
Seahorse
returned to Madras in September and found the
Salisbury
anchored there, Farmer brought Middleton’s complaint to the attention of Commodore Hughes. On the 15th Hughes suspended Henery from duty, but for the moment there were not enough post-captains to form a court. The matter had to be left to fester.
¹⁹