Nelson: The Essential Hero by Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford Read Free Book Online Page A

line-of-battle ships. Unlike the French, however, they did not understand that, however well-built, strong and well-armed a vessel, all is to no avail unless the officers and men are of the same calibre. As Nelson was to note in later years, ‘the Don’ could build fine ships, but he did not know how to handle them. The officers were chosen from the nobility and the men from peasant servitude. Neither were suitable for the sea. Nelson was never to hate the Spaniards as he hated the French. One suspects that he felt some sympathy with them : they were monarchists, something which he respected; their officers knew how to die like gentlemen; and, in the final analysis, they were to become little more than the dupes of Napoleon's imperial ambitions. (The position of Spain relative to that of France in the Napoleonic Wars was somewhat akin to that of Italy and Germany in the Second World War.)
    On his first visit, sent ashore by the commanding officer with despatches and letters, Nelson admired the great fortress-rock of Gibraltar, symbol of Britain's hold over the sea-lanes of the world. He came to know its story: how Admiral Sir George Rooke, in command of a small Anglo-Dutch fleet, had stormed the Rock and seized it from the Spaniards in 1705. Ever since then, having endured its ‘Great Siege’ by the combined French and Spanish forces which began in 1779 and lasted for three years, seven months and twelve days - the longest continuous siege in history - it had become a cornerstone of Empire. The phrase ‘as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar’ had passed into the language. Over his head, as the young acting lieutenant went ashore, the muzzles of guns protruded everywhere from the galleries cut in the great limestone mass, and the British flag waved over them in the wind. The Spaniards could never forgive, nor forget, that encroachment upon their land. It dominated the straits, facing towards Mount Ceuta on the Moroccan coast, only fourteen miles away. Nelson would most probably have known, however sketchy his knowledge of the classics, that the two of them had represented to the ancients the Pillars of Hercules. This was the end of voyaging for early Mediterranean men who, peering fearfully at the great ocean beyond, had decided that they marked the limits of the world.
    Nelson recorded that he ‘was at sea with convoys till April 2nd 1777’, so he knew a hard winter and the kind of weather that the Bay of Biscay can throw at sailors, seas which will founder even the stoutest ships. It was a good training ground, and one to which he would often return, and where he would learn the ominous swell that presages rising winds and storm, and how to handle a ship when they came. Did the hairs on his neck bristle, did a shadow cross his path as he first set foot upon the Rock ? It was to ‘this dark comer of the world’, as he once referred to it in later years, that his body was brought ashore from H.M.S. Victory on 28 October 1805. But now as he looked about him, recovered in health and happily conscious of the dignity of his acting rank, he would have seen in the naval, military and marines’ uniforms happy evidence of that far hand of Empire which he himself had represented in the Arctic, and which he had seen in all its formality in the sun-drenched West Indies. As a seaman he would have remarked on one occasion or another when the east wind, or Levanter, was blowing out of the Mediterranean the ashen tail of the Levanter cloud as the humid air spun up off the sheer eastern face of the Rock, lifting to a thousand feet and more, and then condensed into a cloud that trailed away westerly darkening all Gibraltar and the Bay of Algeciras beyond. He stood at the mouth of the Mediterranean and looked inward from the great ocean at the wrinkled, ancient sea. He would have learned from experience, as well as from instruction, of the two-to three-knot current that flows steadily into the Mediterranean as the Atlantic makes good the