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

And one from England came.

The British Neptune as of yore,

Proved master of the day;

The Spanish Neptune is no more,

The French one ran away.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, though, as carpenters and surgeons went to work with their knives and saws, corpses were flung overboard, and the news of Nelson’s death spread through the fleet, there was little temptation to triumphalism. During his last moments Nelson had repeatedly enjoined Hardy to drop anchor at the end of the day, and yet for some inexplicable reason Collingwood decided against it, condemning his scattered and dismasted fleet itself to every sailor’s nightmare of a heavy swell, a freshening wind and a perilous lee shore.

It would have been harder to say which stuck most vividly in men’s memories of Trafalgar, the battle itself or its terrible aftermath, as the stricken members of the fleet fought for their lives and prizes against a gale that was of a piece with everything that had gone before. In spite of her damage the Neptune was actually in a better state than most to ride it out, and after taking the Royal Sovereign in tow the following day, she was deployed again on the twenty-third to counter a bold enemy attempt to recapture what it could of its lost ships.

With the weather worsening again after a brief respite – the barometer reading that night at the Royal Observatory just south of Cádiz was the lowest ever recorded – and the shattered Combined Fleet in no state to renew a general action, anxieties in Neptune rapidly turned to their hard-won prize. From the moment they had gone into action the towering Santissima Trinidada – the largest battleship in the world – had been marked as theirs, and their first sight of her after the battle, when a prize crew under William Badcock went aboard to take possession, provided a bloody testament to the appalling destruction Neptune’s ‘beautiful firing’ had inflicted. ‘She had between 3 and 400 killed and wounded,’ Badcock told his father, ‘her Beams where coverd with Blood, Brains, and peices of Flesh, and the after part of her Decks with wounded, some without Legs and some without an Arm, what calamities War brings on.’

As conditions grew more desperate than ever, and self-interest gave way to self-preservation, Collingwood gave the order to ‘sink, burn and destroy’ all prizes, and Badcock’s thwarted crew went to work in the dark and mountainous seas. ‘We had to tie the poor mangled wretches around their waists, or where we could,’ another of Neptune’s officers recalled, as lower gun ports were opened, holes cut in the hull, and the last of the wounded winched off, ‘and lower them into a tumbling boat, some without arms, others no legs, and lacerated all over in the most dreadful manner.’

There were 407 taken off in the Neptune’s boats alone – a last boat went back for the ship’s cat, spotted perched on the muzzle of a gun as the Trinidada rolled helplessly in her death throes – and shortly after midnight the pride of the Spanish fleet and Neptune’s prize-money went to the bottom. ‘I am afraid this brilliant Action will not put much money in my pocket,’ wrote Fremantle – unusually benign for him, given that he had nothing more tangible to show for Trafalgar than the Trinidada’s pug dog (the cat had gone to Ajax),

but 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, to a dead one.

There was more than a touch of Jane Austen’s Mrs Musgrove about Parnell Hastings, and as the letters flowed in at Willesley anxiety gave way to a pride every bit as extravagant. ‘Mrs Hastings is a great bore,’ Fremantle wrote back to his wife, after she had complained of the Hastings dragging ‘poor’ Captain Arklom – previously in Neptune – to dinner to ply him with ‘silly questions about their Boy’.

I am afraid Hastings will shoot me, for the first Lieutenant thinking such a small child could not be of use on Deck desired him to go below, which he did without remorse, but is now ashamed of it and have wrote to his father something on the Subject, you must call upon the Woman, and say what is really true that he is a very clever and well disposed boy, and very attentive to his Navigation, if you are half as fidgety about your Doddy who seems to occupy you so much, I will break every bone in your skin.

There is a foreshadowing here of the older Hastings – morbidly sensitive, proud, honourable, intense – and probably a glimpse, too, of the endless teasing and ragging that was part and parcel of a gun-room world that hovered between the chivalries of war and the brute realities of a floating prep school. ‘Young Hastings get [sic] Volumes by every opportunity,’ Fremantle wrote to his wife, as the Neptune resumed blockading duties off Cádiz. ‘His mother put his letters to my address without an envelope, but the part opposite the seal concluded with your Affe. Mother it made no difference, as I did not read a Sylable [sic], indeed if I had I conclude it contained much what Mothers write to their Children at that age.’

Child or not, though – and Hastings was now just twelve – there was a career to be planned for him if he was to be a second Collingwood, and on 2 June 1806 he was transferred by boat from the Neptune to the forty-two-gun Sea Horse under the command of Captain John Stewart. In his later years Hastings never forgot the seamanship and sheer endurance demanded by a winter blockade in Neptune, but the frigate and not the lumbering three-decker was the glamour ship of the navy, the vessel in which captains made their names and fortunes and young officers and midshipmen had their chance to punch above their rank and weight.

The move was the making of Hastings – the Sea Horse the perfect training in the kind of coastal warfare he would make his own – but before that there was convoy duty and a return to England for the first time in eighteen months. ‘My boy of Trafalgar is just arrived,’ Sir Charles wrote proudly to Warren Hastings from Willesley on 2 November, only five days after the Sea Horse anchored at Portsmouth: ‘he appears an unlicked cub – but is considerably advanced in nautical knowledge for his age and time of service – he is only thirteen [twelve in fact] last Febry has been but a year and a half at sea, and is as capable of keeping a day’s reckoning, putting the ship about, in short navigating a ship on board, and that is according to the Capt’s testimony.’

This was not all blind partiality – the only fault Captain Stewart could find with his charge was that he would not grow – and Warren Hastings was more than happy to respond in kind. ‘I think you have much happiness yet in store,’ he wrote back. ‘You will live to see one of your sons a finished gentleman; and the other standing on the summit of glory as a British seaman. Charles Imhoff [Warren Hastings’s stepson] tells me he never saw a youth so much improved, in knowledge, manners or manliness, as the latter in the short time in which he has not seen him.’

Frank had just two months at Willesley – his first holiday at the old Abney seat to which his parents had recently returned – and it was probably as well that he could call on his blockading experience to prepare him for the rigours of home life. He had been only two years old when his father moved to Jersey, and the family’s long absence had left the house in a state of almost comic dilapidation, its roof leaking, draughts howling, the beds a misery, and the dining table so small – Sir Charles complained to Warren Hastings – that the family could not dress for dinner until after dinner because they spent their meals kicking each other under the table and filthying each other’s clothes.

Almost nothing is left now of Willesley – the ornamental lake, the contours of an eighteenth-century landscaped park – but a Vanbrugh-esque stable gateway of Cyclopean proportions gives some idea of what Sir Charles Hastings took on when the family returned to their ‘ruined mansion’. A surviving estate book underlines how seriously he took his duties, but if he did all he could to indulge his wife’s and his son Charles’s passion for the place, he remained at heart the man of affairs he had always been, stoically resigned to finding himself dependent on the London mail or a sight of his boy, Frank, for proof that there was a world beyond his Willesley exile.

He was determined, too, that Frank’s future should not be forgotten while he was at home, taking on the best mathematics tutor that he could find for him; but by the beginning of January 1807 the Sea Horse was being fitted for sea and the end of the holiday was in sight. ‘I have been much more interested about the brilliant exploits of Sir J. Duckworth in the Archipelago, or rather against the Porte,’ Sir Charles wrote rather prematurely to Warren Hastings on 17 April, after the Sea Horse had been diverted from the Far East to the Mediterranean to face a growing Turkish threat in the Aegean, ‘and if it is true that he has forced the Dardanelles and destroyed the whole Turkish navy – Lady Hastings may sleep in peace for she has been much alarmed at the boy going up the Mediterranean and being taken by one of their corsairs and perhaps undergoing a certain operation that would fit him more for the Seraglio than the Navy.’

Frank was well out of the dismal failure of Duckworth’s expedition, and if he had had to forgo Warren Hastings’s Eastern patronage, the Hastings name worked just as well closer to home. ‘I have much pleasure in acquainting you your Dear Frank is in the highest health and spirits,’ General Sir John Smith, an old colleague of Frank’s father on Sir Henry Clinton’s staff during the American War of Independence, wrote from Gibraltar on 21 July: ‘he dined with me about ten days since and Sailed again two days after to join Lord Collingwood … I beg my Dr Sir Charles will rest assured that his old academical fellow poet – Jack Smith – will make a point of paying all possible attention to his son Frank Hastings and that he shall have a mother in Mrs Smith when necessary – anything you may wish to send him – direct to my care and he shall receive it safe.’

With the inevitable lag in news there would always be something for Lady Hastings to worry about, and Mrs Smith was already too late with her motherly attentions. ‘We are just returned from a rather successful cruise,’ John Stewart, another bold, intelligent and talented frigate captain, who had circumnavigated the globe with Vancouver, had written to Sir Charles a fortnight earlier,

and going to sail again in search of Lord Collingwood, who we conclude is gone up to attempt what I expect he will not succeed in, as the French influence will keep the Turks in a warlike temper … We have been unlucky enough to lose a Lieutnt last cruise he was killed in a boat by a round shot which also took the arm of little Lord John Hay [aged fourteen] both of which things vexed me … the former however could not have been prevented, but the little boys were expressly forbid going, I found young Hay had been a favourite of the poor Lieutnt [Young], & had been smuggled into the boat.

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The incident was not enough to stop Hastings stowing away in the ship’s boat just five days later – ‘I gave him a scold but could not be very angry,’ Stewart told Sir Charles – but a Mediterranean frigate was no place to hide a boy. The injury to Hay had occurred in the Hyères Roads while the Sea Horse was engaged with an enemy bombard and merchantman, and over the next two years she was in constant action, exchanging fire with shore batteries at Barcelona, cutting out French vessels, capturing the castle of Pianosa off Elba or destroying magazines and guns in a brilliant raid on Isola di Giannutri in the Ligurian Sea. ‘All our frigate captains are great generals,’ an exhausted but grateful Collingwood, the commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, wrote: ‘… they have taken seven forts, garrisons, or castles, within the last two months, and scaling towers at midnight, and storming redoubts at mid-day, are becoming familiar occurrences. It is really astonishing, those youths think that nothing is beyond their enterprise, and they seldom fail of success.’

There could have been no better theatre for Hastings to learn the importance of this brand of warfare, and with the exception, perhaps, of Cochrane, few abler teachers than Stewart. In the scale of European events these victories might have seemed little more than pinpricks, but quite apart from the effects on national morale, the mayhem caused along the French and Spanish coasts by ships like the Sea Horse or Imperieuse demonstrated that under the right command naval power could exert a strategic influence on land warfare out of all proportion to numbers or firepower.

Hastings would never be averse to the kind of verve and élan that characterised these operations – the Kangaroo demonstrates that – but there were other lessons, too, of a dourer and more professional kind, that he was taking in. At the age of fourteen he had served under two captains of very different temperaments, and if there was one thing he had learned from both, it was that if there had to be war – ‘the art of killing in the most speedy way possible’, as Hastings bluntly put it – then it had to be fought with all the ruthlessness and efficiency that could be mustered.

Implicit in this credo was the conviction that the end justified the means – fireships, mortar ships, ‘stink vessels’, hot shot, anything – because wherever the Battle of Waterloo was to be won, Trafalgar had most certainly not been won on the playing fields of Eton. ‘The objection of unfair is so ridiculous, and so childish,’ Hastings would again write, haughtily showing just how well he had absorbed the lessons of the Mediterranean, ‘that I should consider I was insulting the understanding of the public by mentioning it, had I not heard it reiterated so often, and by people whose opinions go for something in the world … I have heard pretenders to humanity talk of the cruelty of hot shot, shells, etc; it really appears to me the superlative of cant to talk of the art of war (or, in other words, the method of killing men most expeditiously) and humanity in the same breath.’

This might have been Cochrane talking, and with the political situation deteriorating – Portugal under threat, Turkey and Russia (a nigh impossible ‘double’) both hostile, Denmark implacable, Sicily in danger, America muttering, France threatening the Ionian Isles and Britain without an ally to her name except the bizarre Gustavus of Sweden – Hastings would have found few dissenters in the Mediterranean Squadron. ‘We have been out from Syracuse ten days looking after the Toulon fleet which is expected to be making for Corfu,’ Captain Stewart – as ever spoiling for a fight – wrote to Sir Charles Hastings. ‘Thornbrough is following them up & Ld Collingwood (with whom we are) sitting in their route, our force is five of the line, myself & a brig; theirs five of the line, four frigates & several corvettes besides transports in all 20 sail, we are full of hopes and ardour & night or day they are to be attacked the moment we can meet them.’

Stewart was disappointed of his ‘Toulon Gentlemen’, but by the time he wrote – 11 January 1808, dated ’07 in error – the Sea Horse was in the eastern Mediterranean and facing a very different kind of challenge. Towards the end of the previous year Collingwood had negotiated an arrangement with the Porte to exclude Turkish warships from the Aegean, but as the Greek islanders took advantage of their masters’ absence and Anglo-Ottoman relations hovered somewhere between war and peace, the Sea Horse found herself the solitary British presence in an exclusion zone that the Turks had no intention of honouring. ‘You will expect me to say something about the Turks,’ Stewart told Sir Charles, warming to a subject dear to every frigate captain’s heart – prize-money –

with whom we have been Philandering for so long, in fact from the hour that Sebastiani [Napoleon’s envoy to the Porte] knew of the Treaty of Tilsit, Sir A. Paget [Britain’s Ambassador] might have departed, as it was (between friends) it ended in them at last sending him away & saying they would not receive any more flags of Truce from the ship he was in. We in my opinion did wrong in forbearing from making war on them during the negotiations … had we done as we have since done, take burn & destroy, I seriously believe they might have made peace with us … Now I understand they want to begin a negotiation, we are not now at war they say & it is no prize money to us Captains, but I would like to know what name can be given to our footing with that nation, we must coin a word. I alone destroyed or took twelve of their vessels, only four of which are in Malta, who is to account for the rest?

‘Take burn & destroy’ – it might have been the motto of the Mediterranean fleet – and whatever his fears over the legal status of his prizes, they were never going to stop Stewart when the chance came. Through the early months of 1808 the Sea Horse had been constantly engaged in capturing or destroying cargo bound for Constantinople, and when on 1 July, while riding at anchor off the island of Sira, wind came of bigger game with the news that, in defiance of Collingwood’s agreement, a substantial Turkish flotilla had come through the Dardanelles to punish their rebellious Greek subject, Stewart did not hesitate.

The same day he began working the Sea Horse up from Sira against a north-north-easterly, and at noon on the fifth he received confirmation of the Turkish movements from a Greek ship bound for Malta. Taking advantage of a light south-easterly the Sea Horse immediately made all sail, and at 5.45 p.m. saw between the islands of Skopelos and Dromo two enemy men-of-war, the twenty-six-gun Alis-Fezan and the larger and more powerful fifty-two-gun, 1,300-ton Badere-Zaffer, Captain Scandril Kitchuc-Ali.

Stewart had, in fact, been expecting far longer odds for the forty-two-gun Sea Horse, and faced with only two opposing vessels, closed on the Turkish ships until at 9.30 he was near enough to hail the Turkish commodore and demand his surrender. ‘This Captain Scandril flatly refused,’ William James, prize court judge, historian and shamelessly partisan hammer of the American navy, wrote, ‘and into the hull of the Badere-Zaffer went a whole double-shotted broadside of the Sea Horse. Nor was the Turkish frigate slow in returning the fire. In this way, with the wind a light breeze about two points abaft the starboard beam, the two frigates went off engaging; the Badere-Zaffer gradually edging away to close her consort, who was about a gun-shot distant.’

For the next half-hour the two ships manoeuvred for position, with the heavier and better-manned Badere-Zaffer attempting to board, and Stewart employing all his seamanship to fight the battle on his terms. At 10 o’clock he had again got his ship on the larboard quarter of his enemy when the Alis-Fezan interposed herself, taking from Sea Horse at a range of no more than a cable’s length a devastating starboard broadside that within ten minutes had driven her out of the action.

As the Alis-Fezan limped burning into the Aegean night, her crew decimated by the Sea Horse’s gunnery, her hull racked by explosions, Stewart turned his attention back to the Badere-Zaffer. The Turkish captain was as determined as before to exploit his overwhelming advantage in manpower, but as the two ships ran before the wind exchanging broadsides and Captain Scandril again closed to board, Stewart swung the Sea Horse across the Badere-Zaffer’s bow – losing her gaff vangs and mizzen and starboard mizzen back-stays to the enemy bowsprit as he did so – and raked her crowded forecastle with grape from his stern-chase guns as she passed.