Nelson: The Essential Hero Read Online Free PDF Page A

system of special instruction ashore. From the moment that Horatio Nelson stepped into the gun-room he was part and parcel of the vessel in a way which few modern seamen in their highly complex and specialised skills can ever be.
    The midshipmen were instructed every forenoon by a certificated schoolmaster in coastal and celestial navigation and in trigonometry. The ‘schooly’ also kept a strict eye on their behaviour and morals, reporting regularly to the captain on the character and potentialities of his charges. More often than not the schoolmaster was also the ship’s chaplain. When at sea, the boys were assembled on the upper deck to take the sun’s meridian altitude at noon with their quadrants. The quadrant, used for taking sun, moon and star altitudes, had been known in simple form since the thirteenth century, when it had been used by the Portuguese navigators during their epic voyages of discovery. By Nelson’s time it had become a highly reliable precision instrument and was generally, but wrongly, believed to be a British invention. (Edmund Stone in an appendix to his book on navigational instruments published in 1758 categorically stated that ‘The first of these instruments . . . was invented long ago by Sir Isaac Newton’.) They were then sent below to work out the latitude, combining this with a dead-reckoning of the ship’s position. Nelson would soon have found out that, whether at sea or in port, there was little rest. If they were at sea they were employed on the watches to learn an officer’s duties, while at the same time they were expected to mix with the men in all operations of sail-changing, either on deck at the braces, or aloft furling canvas. In the mornings one of their duties was to see that the sailors’ hammocks were properly lashed and stowed and, in general, to supervise all the operations of the ship. In harbour, as well as at sea, they were kept permanently busy as messengers by the First Lieutenant and one of their primary duties was boat service. If it was a hard life, it was a healthy one, and Nelson undoubtedly benefited from it.
    It is unlikely, since he was a ‘youngster’ and aboard a ship commanded by his uncle, that Nelson saw much of the seamier or more squalid side of life as it was lived in the ‘olders’ ’ mess, where those who had reached the age of fifteen and had been rated as midshipmen lived under conditions that have often been described, though by few better than Frederick Chamier in his Life of a Sailor (1833):
    Cups were used instead of glasses. The soup tureen, a heavy lumbering piece of block tin, pounded into shape, was, for want of a ladle, emptied with an ever-lasting tea cup; the forks were wiped on the table cloth by the persons about to use them, who, to save eating more than was requisite of actual dirt, always plunged them through the table cloth to clean between the prongs. . . . The rest of the furniture was not much cleaner; now and then an empty bottle served as a candlestick; and I have known both a shoe and a quadrant-case used as a soup plate. . . . [The midshipman] dressed and undressed in public; the basin was invariably of pewter; and the wet towels, dirty head-brush etc., were, after use, deposited in his chest. A hammock served as a bed, and so closely were we all stowed in war, that the side of one hammock always touched that of another; fourteen inches being declared quite sufficient space for one tired midshipman.
    What Captain Chamier omits to say in his depressing account of the midshipman’s life is that a hammock was far more comfortable than a bunk or a bed in a seaway and, whatever else may have been amiss in the midshipmen’s quarters, hammocks were eminently practical. (They remained in use in the Royal Navy and the United States Navy until after the Second World War.)
    On the Raisonable' s paying off, Captain Suckling was transferred to the 74-gun Triumph , guardship at the Nore, that famous sandbank at the mouth of