In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main road,
some by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned
by the genius of Nelson I am going to err into such a by-path. If the
reader will keep me company I shall be glad. At the least we can promise
ourselves that pleasure which is wickedly said to be in sinning, for a
literary sin the divergence will be.
Very likely it is no new remark that the inventions of our time have at
last brought about a change in sea warfare in degree corresponding to
the revolution in all warfare effected by the original introduction from
China into Europe of gunpowder. The first European firearm, a clumsy
contrivance, was, as is well known, scouted by no few of the knights as
a base implement, good enough peradventure for weavers too craven to
stand up crossing steel with steel in frank fight. But as ashore
knightly valour, though shorn of its blazonry, did not cease with the
knights, neither on the seas, though nowadays in encounters there a
certain kind of displayed gallantry be fallen out of date as hardly
applicable under changed circumstances, did the nobler qualities of such
naval magnates as Don John of Austria, Doria, Van Tromp, Jean Bart, the
long line of British admirals and the American Decaturs of 1812 become
obsolete with their wooden walls.
Nevertheless, to anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without
being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one
the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson’s _Victory_, seems to float
there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but
also as a poetic reproach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the
_Monitors_ and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads. And this
not altogether because such craft are unsightly, unavoidably lacking the
symmetry and grand lines of the old battle-ships, but equally for other
reasons.
There are some, perhaps, who while not altogether inaccessible to that
poetic reproach just alluded to, may yet on behalf of the new order be
disposed to parry it; and this to the extent of iconoclasm, if need be.
For example, prompted by the sight of the star inserted in the
_Victory’s_ deck designating the spot where the Great Sailor fell, these
martial utilitarians may suggest considerations implying that Nelson’s
ornate publication of his person in battle was not only unnecessary, but
not military, nay, savoured of foolhardiness and vanity. They may add,
too, that at Trafalgar it was in effect nothing less than a challenge to
death; and death came; and that but for his bravado the victorious
admiral might possibly have survived the battle, and so, instead of
having his sagacious dying injunctions overruled by his immediate
successor in command, he himself when the contest was decided might have
brought his shattered fleet to anchor, a proceeding which might have
averted the deplorable loss of life by shipwreck in the elemental
tempest that followed the martial one.
Well, should we set aside the more than disputable point whether for
various reasons it was possible to anchor the fleet, then plausibly
enough the Bethamites of war may urge the above.
But he _might have been_ is but boggy ground to build on. And certainly
in foresight as to the larger issue of an encounter, and anxious
preparations for it--buoying the deadly way and mapping it out, as at
Copenhagen--few commanders have been so painstakingly circumspect as
this reckless declarer of his person in fight.
Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish
considerations, is surely no special virtue in a military man; while an
excessive love of glory, exercising to the uttermost the honest
heart-felt sense of duty, is the first. If the name _Wellington_ is not
so much of a trumpet to the blood as the simpler name _Nelson_, the
reason for this may perhaps be inferred from the above. Alfred in his
funeral ode on the victor of Waterloo ventures not to call him the
greatest soldier of all time, though in the same ode he invokes Nelson
as ‘the greatest sailor since the world began.’
At Trafalgar Nelson on the brink of opening the fight sat down and wrote
his last brief will and testament. If under the presentiment of the most
magnificent of all victories, to be crowned by his own glorious death, a
sort of priestly motive led him to dress his person in the jewelled
vouchers of his own shining deeds; if thus to have adorned himself for
the altar and the sacrifice were indeed vainglory, then affectation and
fustian is each truly heroic line in the great epics and dramas, since
in such lines the poet but embodies in verse those exaltations of
sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity being given,
vitalises into acts.
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V
The outbreak at the Nore was put down. But not every grievance was
redressed. If the contractors, for example, were no longer permitted to
ply some practices peculiar to their tribe everywhere, such as providing
shoddy cloth, rations not sound, or false in the measure; not the less
impressment, for one thing, went on. By custom sanctioned for centuries,
and judicially maintained by a Lord Chancellor as late as Mansfield,
that mode of manning the fleet, a mode now fallen into a sort of
abeyance but never formally renounced, it was not practicable to give up
in those years. Its abrogation would have crippled the indispensable
fleet, one wholly under canvas, no steam-power, its innumerable sails
and thousands of cannon, everything in short, worked by muscle alone; a
fleet the more insatiate in demand for men, because then multiplying its
ships of all grades against contingencies present and to come of the
convulsed Continent.
Discontent foreran the Two Mutinies, and more or less it lurkingly
survived them. Hence it was not unreasonable to apprehend some return of
trouble sporadic or general. One instance of such apprehensions: In the
same year with this story, Nelson, then Vice-Admiral Sir Horatio, being
with the fleet off the Spanish coast, was directed by the admiral in
command to shift his pennant from the _Captain_ to the _Theseus_; and
for this reason: that the latter ship having newly arrived in the
station from home where it had taken part in the Great Mutiny, danger
was apprehended from the temper of the men; and it was thought that an
officer like Nelson was the one, not indeed to terrorise the crew into
base subjection, but to win them by force of his mere presence back to
an allegiance, if not as enthusiastic as his own, yet as true. So it
was, that for a time on more than one quarter-deck anxiety did exist. At
sea precautionary vigilance was strained against relapse. At short
notice an engagement might come on. When it did, the lieutenants
assigned to batteries felt it incumbent on them in some instances to
stand with drawn swords behind the men working the guns.
But on board the seventy-four in which Billy now swung his hammock very
little in the manner of the men and nothing obvious in the demeanour of
the officers would have suggested to an ordinary observer that the Great
Mutiny was a recent event. In their general bearing and conduct the
commissioned officers of a warship naturally take their tone from the
commander, that is if he have that ascendency of character that ought to
be his.
Captain the Honourable Edward Fairfax Vere, to give his full title, was
a bachelor of forty or thereabouts, a sailor of distinction, even in a
time prolific of renowned seamen. Though allied to the higher nobility,
his advancement had not been altogether owing to influences connected
with that circumstance. He had seen much service, been in various
engagements, always acquitting himself as an officer mindful of the
welfare of his men, but never tolerating an infraction of discipline;
thoroughly versed in the science of his profession, and intrepid to the
verge of temerity, though never injudiciously so. For his gallantry in
the West Indian waters as flag-lieutenant under Rodney in that admiral’s
crowning victory over De Grasse, he was made a post-captain.
Ashore in the garb of a civilian, scarce anyone would have taken him for
a sailor, more especially that he never garnished unprofessional talk
with nautical terms, and grave in his bearing, evinced little
appreciation of mere humour. It was not out of keeping with these traits
that on a passage when nothing demanded his paramount action, he was the
most undemonstrative of men. Any landsman observing this gentleman, not
conspicuous by his stature and wearing no pronounced insignia, emerging
from his retreat to the open deck, and noting the silent deference of
the officers retiring to leeward, might have taken him for the King’s
guest, a civilian aboard the King’s ship, some highly honourable
discreet envoy on his way to an important post. But, in fact, this
unobtrusiveness of demeanour may have proceeded from a certain
unaffected modesty of manhood sometimes accompanying a resolute nature,
a modesty evinced at all times not calling for pronounced action, and
which shown in any rank of life suggests a virtue aristocratic in kind.
As with some others engaged in various departments of the world’s more
heroic activities, Captain Vere, though practical enough upon occasion,
would at times betray a certain dreaminess of mood. Standing alone on
the weather-side of the greater deck, one hand holding by the rigging,
he would absently gaze off at the black sea. At the presentation to him
then of some minor matter interrupting the current of his thoughts, he
would show more or less irascibility; but instantly he would control it.
In the Navy he was popularly known by the appellation--Starry Vere. How
such a designation happened to fall upon one who, whatever his sturdy
qualities, was without any brilliant ones, was in this wise: a favourite
kinsman, Lord Denton, a free-handed fellow, had been the first to meet
and congratulate him upon his return to England from the West Indian
cruise; and but the day previous turning over a copy of Andrew Marvell’s
poems had lighted, not for the first time however, upon the lines
entitled ‘Appelton House,’ the name of one of the seats of their common
ancestor, a hero in the German wars of the seventeenth century, in which
poem occur the lines,
‘This ’tis to have been from the first
In a domestic heaven nursed,
Under the discipline severe
Of Fairfax and the starry Vere.’
And so, upon embracing his cousin fresh from Rodney’s victory, wherein
he had played so gallant a part, brimming over with just family pride in
the sailor of their house, he exuberantly exclaimed, ‘Give ye joy, Ed;
give ye joy, my starry Vere!’ This got currency, and the novel prefix
serving in familiar parlance readily to distinguish the _Indomitable’s_
captain from another Vere, his senior, a distant relative, an officer of
like rank in the Navy, it remained permanently attached to the surname.
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