Nelson: The Essential Hero Read Online Free PDF

the Thames. It was a dull routine job, and one which offered practically no chance for a young man to learn about the sea-life, or indeed about anything very much except sailing and handling the ship’s boats. Maurice Suckling very wisely decided that his nephew needed sea-experience, and something in the youth’s bearing and capabilities as shown during his brief time in Raisonable must have convinced him that it was worth giving him a real chance to prove himself. Nelson had been entered in the books of the Triumph as ‘captain’s servant’, a normal custom of the time whereby captains could take young relatives along to sea with them - and designed most probably to ensure that they could keep a strict eye on them. It was in this capacity that Maurice Suckling recommended Horatio to John Rathbone, master of a West Indiaman, running from the Bahamas and the Antilles all the way through the sunny, sugar-cane islands as far as Venezuela. Nelson saw real sea-time for the first time aboard a merchantman, and the experience was to have a lasting effect upon him.
    The little he had seen of naval life in the Raisonable had probably shocked a sensitive youth, fresh from the quiet of Norfolk and from the age-old decencies of church and family life at Burnham. His own words written from Port Mahon in 1799, twenty-eight years later, show that the impressions made by the Merchant Service after his initial experience of the Royal Navy still had not faded :
    ‘Erroneous principle’ Nelson may well have been able to term it all those years and triumphs later, but it is clear how deeply it had sunk in that he should recall it in the very short space of his autobiography.
    So now he saw the chops of the Channel for the first time, felt the long Atlantic surge as the merchantman ran down with the northeast trade winds boosting her canvas. With all sail set, she made that sparkling passage which puts Europe behind, and suddenly one day hauls up out of a seemingly limitless skyline the wind-broomed islands of the West. The youth who had known nothing but the simplicities of the English countryside, and then that brief spell aboard the Raisonable in ‘Chatty Chatham’, encountered the brilliant Caribbean seas, flying-fish weather, the eternal green of the tropics, and an entire new world. The discipline, though stringent aboard a merchantman, had none of the harshness of a man-of-war. Captain Rathbone was kind to the young man, and life, which had seemed to close upon him with the harsh thud of a gun-port coming down, opened in a flower of islands. His fresh eyes registered black faces; immaculately dressed white planters; longshoremen of all types; bum-boats piled with unfamiliar fruit; lean dark bodies diving for small coins or buttons; orchids and tobacco; the rich plantation-lands that gave Europe its sugar, and the local boats carved from a single tree-trunk that crested under thin sails over the flashing Trade Wind seas. After a year, when he returned to rejoin the Triumph , he had a memory of this world that he would never lose. He might have echoed their great discoverer who, all those centuries before on his first voyage westward, had written : ‘It is like April in Andalusia. Nothing is missing except the nightingales. . . . How great a pleasure is the taste of the mornings!’
    Captain Suckling, seeing perhaps in this sun-tanned young nephew a spirit of antagonism towards the Navy (Nelson could never conceal his feelings), came to the wise decision to give him as much practical boat-work as possible. This was something that got a youngster out into the cold fresh air and gave him a feeling of independence as well as responsibility. Nelson applied himself to his navigation, and was then allowed to put it into practice in the Triumph's cutter, and later in her decked long-boat. This experience was to serve him in good stead, for it was to some extent on account of his proven abilities in command of small boats that he secured