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If ever a man was doomed by birth it was Frank Abney Hastings. In the weeks and months after the Kangaroo incident, there was scarcely a day when one word of apology could not have saved his career, when a single gesture of moderation or even cautious self-interest could not have redeemed his reputation; but he was quite simply incapable of making it. ‘Your Lordship may find officers that will submit to such language,’ he wrote instead to Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty,
but I don’t envy them their dear purchased rank & God forbid the British Navy should have no better supporters of its character than such contemptible creatures. A great stress has been layed upon the circumstance of the challenge being delivered to Capt Parker on the Quarter deck, but … why the contents of a sealed challenge should be known to bystanders any more than the contents of a dinner invitation I confess myself at a loss to divine.
If this was hardly the language of conciliation or compromise, the truth was that there was nothing in Hastings’s temperament or background that would have counselled a place for either. For six hundred years the Hastings family had amassed titles and lands with a daring promiscuity, alternately the favourites and the victims of successive English monarchs to whom they were too closely related for comfort, safety or humility. ‘Though the noble Earl was sprung from ancestors the most noble that this Kingdom could boast,’ the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote in 1789 on the death of Frank’s grandfather, the 10th Earl of Huntingdon,
Plantagenet, Hastings, Beauchamp, Neville, Stafford, Devereux, Pole, Stanley, it might be said also that they were most unfortunate. The Duke of Gloucester was strangled at Calais. The Duke of Clarence was put to death privately [fine word, ‘private’] in the Tower. The Countess of Salisbury, his daughter, was publicly beheaded, as was also her son … Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, was beheaded by Richard III. Robert Devereux, the famous Earl of Essex, died on a scaffold in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The untimely deaths of the gallant Nevilles are sufficiently known. The founder of the Huntingdon family, William Lord Hastings, lost his head in the Tower …
No family that includes Warwick the Kingmaker and Essex can put such a record entirely down to ill-luck, and it sometimes seems as if the Hastings went out of their way to import vices that were not already indigenous to the tribe. From the sixteenth century onwards there had been a distinct streak of religious extremism in the family, and in the seventeenth fanaticism was wedded to real madness with the marriage of the 5th Earl to Lucy Davies, a niece of the Lord Castlehaven beheaded for sodomy and abetting the rape of his wife, and the devoted daughter of that notorious prophetess, Bedlamite and ‘abominable stinking great Symnell face excrement’ of Stuart England, Lady Eleanor Davies.
To marry into one unstable family might be a misfortune, but to marry into two smacks of something more culpable, and to the toxic infusion of Castlehaven’s Touchet blood in the seventeenth century was added that of the Shirleys in the eighteenth. This latter alliance came at a time when some of the old Hastings energy seemed at last to be dissipating, but in the tyrannical and litigious Selina Shirley, Countess of Huntingdon – cousin of the Earl Ferrers hanged for murder, founder of the religious cult bearing her name and, by turns, Wesleyan, mystic, ritualist and damnation-breathing Calvinist – the Hastings could again boast a figure to hold her bigoted own with any in the family’s long and bloody history.
It is astonishing, in fact, how successfully the Hastings clan came through an Augustan age of Lord Chesterfield, ‘manners’ and rhyming couplets and emerged on the other side with all their traditions of violence and excess so wonderfully intact. In a letter to Warren Hastings – no relative but a close friend – Frank’s father once cheerfully confessed to their ‘naturally hot and spicy’ blood, and whether they were Calvinist or atheists, shooting themselves or shooting their steward, hanging rebels in America or being hanged at Tyburn, the young Frank’s immediate family bequeathed to him a tradition of volatility that found its inevitable echo in his challenge to Captain Hyde Parker.
Throughout his life Frank would be abnormally sensitive to the claims of a family that, in its more modest moments, traced its ancestry back ‘eleven hundred years before Christ’, and for him there was a twist that might well have added a morbid prickliness to the natural Hastings hauteur. From the first creation of the earldom in the sixteenth century the Huntingdon title had descended in more or less regulation mode to the middle of the eighteenth, but when the 9th Earl died of a fit of apoplexy in 1746, he was succeeded by a seventeen-year-old son whose well-publicised contempt for women of a marriageable class had soon eased him into the arms of the Parisian ballerina and ‘first dancer of the universe’, Louise – ‘La Lanilla’ – Madeleine Lany.
The result of that ‘Philosophical and merely sentimental commerce’, as his friend and moral guide Lord Chesterfield silkily put it, was a baby boy born on 11 March 1752. By the time this ‘young Ascanius’ arrived in the world ‘La Lanilla’ had already been abandoned, and while Huntingdon continued his philosophical and sentimental education on a diet of Spanish paintings and Italian women, the infant Charles was removed from France and sent over to Ireland to be brought up ‘as brothers’ with his cousin Francis Rawdon, the future 2nd Lord Moira in the Irish Peerage, Baron Rawdon in the English, 1st Marquis of Hastings and Governor General of India.
Of all the generations of Hastings who shaped Frank’s future, Charles Hastings – his father – is infinitely the most engaging. There seems little now that can be known of his early childhood, but in 1770 he was bought a commission in the 12th of Foot, and over the next twenty years enjoyed as successful a career as was possible at that nadir of British army fortunes, distinguishing himself in America and at the siege of Gibraltar before finally rising by purchase and patronage to the rank of lieutenant general and the colonelcy of his old regiment.
With the powerful Hastings connections behind him, the friendship of the Prince of Wales, and a pedigree and personality that might have been designed for the louche world of Carlton House, the only things missing from Charles’s life were the title that went into abeyance on the Earl’s death in 1789 and the fortune and family seat that passed to his Moira cousin. He would have to wait another sixteen years for the minor compensation of a baronetcy, but in the year after his father’s death he augmented his modest inheritance by marriage to a Parnell Abney, the sole daughter and heiress of Thomas Abney of Willesley Hall, a handsome but dilapidated estate with a landscaped park and ornamental lake just two miles south of the historical Hastings power base at Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
Charles was thirty-eight on his marriage, and still only forty-one in 1793 when war broke out with France, but to his deep frustration a Tory government could find no active use for him in the years ahead. The seven years between 1796 and 1803 were spent instead in command of the garrison on Jersey, and by the time his friends came into power, age, ill-health and a growing melancholy had reduced him to a kind of English version of Tolstoy’s old Prince Bolkonski, brooding in his library over his maps and despatches as Bonaparte’s armies redrew the boundaries of Europe.
It is hard to imagine what solace a world-weary free-thinker can have found in Parnell Hastings – ‘a great bore’ is the only surviving judgement on her – but the one thing they shared was a deep love of their two surviving children. It would seem that their eldest, Charles, was always closer to his mother than to his father, but if there were times when the old general thought a good dose of peppers in the boy’s porridge would cure him of his ‘milk-sop’ tendencies, there were no such fears over his younger and favourite lad, Frank, born in 1794 and destined from an early age for a career in the navy.
With his father’s royal and military connections – Lord Rawdon was Commander-in Chief for Scotland and Sir John Moore a close friend – it seems odd that Frank did not follow him into the army, and odder still when one remembers the grim reality of naval life in 1805. In May 1803 the brief and bogus Peace of Amiens had come to its predictable end, and for the two years since Britain’s weary and overstretched navy had struggled from the Mediterranean narrows to the North Sea to contain the threat of the French and Spanish fleets while the country steeled itself for invasion.
It is only in retrospect that 1805 seems the year to go to sea, because with Napoleon abandoning his invasion plans, and the allied fleets holing up in Cádiz after their West Indies flirtation, the only certain prospect facing Frank as his father took him down to Plymouth was the ‘long, tiresome and harassing blockade’ work that had become the navy’s stock in trade. ‘I think it incumbent upon me to announce to you the disposal of my boy,’ a grateful Charles Hastings wrote to Warren Hastings on 11 June 1805, a month after entering Frank as a Volunteer First Class under the command of one of Nelson’s most bilious, courageous and uxorious captains, the solidly Whig Thomas Fremantle, ‘whom you were so kind as to patronize by writing to Lord St Vincent. He is at present with the Channel fleet on board the Neptune of 98 guns commanded by my friend Captain Fremantle. We have heard from him since, and he is so delighted with his profession that he declares nothing shall ever tempt him to quit it – I took him down to Plymouth myself.’
It would be hard to exaggerate how alien and hermetic a world it was that closed around the young Hastings when his father deposited him at Plymouth. As a small child growing up on Jersey he would have been familiar enough with garrison life, but nothing could have prepared him for the overpowering strangeness of a great sea-port during wartime, its utter self-sufficiency and concentration of purpose, its remoteness from the normal rhythms of national life, its distinctive mix of chaos and order, its forest of masts and myriad ships’ boats, or the sheer, outlandish oddity of its inhabitants. ‘The English keep the secrets of their navy close guarded,’ the young Robert Southey, masquerading in print as the travelling Spanish nobleman Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, wrote two years later of his attempt to penetrate the sealed-off worlds of Britain’s historic ports. ‘The streets in Plymouth are swarming with sailors. This extraordinary race of men hold the soldier in utter contempt, which with their characteristic force, they express by this scale of comparison, – Mess-mate before ship-mate, ship-mate before a stranger, a stranger before a dog, and a dog before a soldier.’
At the outbreak of the Napoleonic War the Royal Navy was quite simply the largest and most complex industrialised organisation in the world, and it was in the great south coast ports of Plymouth or Portsmouth that this took on its most overwhelming physical expression. ‘A self-contained walled-town,’ wrote Caroline Alexander in her magical evocation of the dockyards that serviced the world’s greatest fleet – eighty-eight ships of the line in commission the year Frank joined, thirteen ‘Fifties’, 125 frigates, ninety-two sloops, eighteen bombs, forty gunbrigs, six gunboats, eighty-two cutters and schooners and forty-one armed ships,
the great yard encompassed every activity required to send ships to sea … There were offices and storehouses, and neat brick houses … as well as the massive infrastructure required to produce a ship. In the Rope-house all cordage was spun, from light line to massive anchor cable, in lengths of more than a thousand feet, some so thick that eighty men were required to handle them … Timber balks and spires of wood lay submerged in the Main Pond, seasoning until called to use. In the blacksmith’s shop were wrought ninety hundred-weight anchors in furnaces that put visitors in mind of ‘the forge of Vulcan.’ And on the slips, or docked along the waterfront, were the 180-foot hulls of men-of-war, the great battle-wounded ships brought for recovery, or the skeletons of new craft, their hulking, cavernous frames suggesting monstrous sea animals from a vanished, fearsome age.
Along with all this industrial might came the people, the contractors and tradesmen, the wives and prostitutes, the shopkeepers and clerks, and the thousands of workers who kept the fleets at sea. ‘I could not think what world I was in,’ another boy recalled his introduction to this alien culture, ‘whether among spirits or devils. All seemed strange; different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep or in a dream, and never properly awake.’
If it was an alien world, though, with its own language and languages – England, Ireland, Canada, America, the Baltic, Spain, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Sardinia, Venice, they were all represented in Neptune – its own customs, and traditions, its own time-keeping, arcane ways of business and overlapping hierarchies, it was a world the young Hastings took to as if he had known no other. ‘Whilst on board with him (although only eleven years old last month),’ Sir Charles proudly told Warren Hastings, ‘he offered to go up the masthead without going through the Lubbers’ hole which however Capt Fremantle would not permit as I could not have borne seeing him make the attempt – I have no doubt that he will do very well if his education is not neglected but as there is a Schoolmaster on board I entertain great hopes of him making a proficiency.’
There were thirty-four boys in all entered in Neptune’s muster book – the youngest nine years old (there was a four-year-old girl in Victory, born in HMS Ardent in the middle of the Battle of Copenhagen) – though only a handful rated ‘Volunteer First Class’ who were destined to be officers. There was still such a wide divergence of practice from ship to ship that it is impossible to generalise about these boys’ duties, but in a world of interest and patronage, the naturally symbiotic relationship of captain and volunteer was a well-connected boy like Hastings’s best guarantee of the training his father had wanted for him. ‘My Dear General,’ – that ‘most mischievous political quack … Mr Pitt’ was still alive and the general as yet without his baronetcy – Captain Fremantle was soon writing to Frank’s father, conscientiously carrying out his side of the bargain: ‘… of your boy I can say nothing but what ought to make you and Mrs Hastings very happy, he is very mild and tractable, attentive to his books & dashing when with the youngsters of his own age. I declare I have had no occasion to hint even anything to him, as he is so perfectly well behaved.’
With all the ‘dash’ and patronage in the world, a man-of-war like Neptune, with her 116 marines and ship’s company of 570 brawling, drunken, thieving seamen recruited or pressed from across the globe, was a tough school for any boy. ‘Who can paint in words what I felt?’ Edward Trelawny, whose path would later cross with Hastings’s in Greece, histrionically recalled his first days as a thirteen-year-old midshipman in that summer of 1805. ‘Imagine me torn from my native country, destined to cross the wide ocean, to a wild region, cut off from every tie, or possibility of communication, transported like a felon, as it were, for life … I was torn away, not seeing my mother, or brothers, or sisters, or one familiar face; no voice to speak a word of comfort, or to inspire me with the smallest hope that anything human took an interest in me.’
Trelawny had his own sub-Byronic line in self-pity and self-dramatisation to peddle, but even in Neptune and under a captain like Fremantle, there were no soft edges to the gunroom. ‘I thought my heart would break with grief,’ William Badcock, a fellow ‘mid’ in Neptune when Hastings joined, recalled. ‘The first night on board was not the most pleasant; the noises unusual to a novice – sleeping in a hammock for the first time – its tarry smell – the wet cables for a bed carpet … Time however reconciles us to everything, and the gaiety and thoughtlessness of youth, added to the cocked hat, desk, spy-glass, etc of a nautical fit out, assisted wonderfully to dry my tears.’
And for all the brutal horseplay – ‘sawing your bed-posts’, ‘reefing your bed-clothes’, ‘blowing the grampus’ (sluicing a new boy with water) – and the ever-present threat of the ‘sky parlour’ or masthead for punishment, there was none of the institutional or private tyranny in Neptune so vividly recorded in Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son. A midshipman coming off watch might spend his first half-hour unravelling his tightly knotted blanket in the dark, but with cribbage and draughts to play, book work to be done and stories of Captain Cook to be wheedled out of the old quartermaster, Badcock did his ‘fellows in Neptune the justice to say that a more kind-hearted set was not to be met with’.
Hastings did not have long in Plymouth to acclimatise himself to this new world. On 17 May, after a hasty refit, the Neptune was ready again for sea. ‘I begin my journal with saying that I have passed as miserable a day and night as I could well expect,’ Fremantle complained to his wife Betsey the same night, as his sluggish-handling new ship pitched and rolled in heavy seas and Plymouth, home and family slipped below the horizon:
tho’ I have no particular reason why that should be the case … I dined with young Hastings only on a fowl and some salt pork, as triste as a gentleman needs to be … my mind hangs constantly towards you and your children, and I am at times so low I cannot hold up my head … my only hope is in a peace, which I trust in God may be brought about through the mediation of Russia. These French rascals will never come out and fight but will continue to annoy and wear out both our spirits and constitutions.
This two-month cruise with the Channel Squadron gave Hastings his first experience of blockade work, and after another brief refit at Plymouth he was soon again at sea. Fremantle had no more real belief in bringing the French out to battle than he had ever had, but by 3 August they were once more off Ushant and before the end of the month had joined Collingwood’s growing squadron blockading the enemy fleets inside Cádiz. ‘I am in hope Lord Nelson will come here as nobody is to my mind so equal to the command as he is,’ Fremantle wrote to his wife on 31 August:
it will require some management to supply so large a force with water and provisions, and as the combined fleets are safely lodged in Cadiz, here I conclude we shall remain until Domesday or until we are blown off the Coast, when the French men will again escape us. I can say little about my Ship, we go much as usual and if any opportunity offers of bringing the Enemy’s Fleet to battle, I think she will show herself, but still I am not half satisfied at being in a large Ship that don’t sail and must be continually late in action.
They might well have stayed there till doomsday, but while Fremantle fretted and flogged, a messenger was already on the road to Cádiz with orders for the French Admiral Villeneuve to take the fleet into the Mediterranean in support of the Emperor’s new European ambitions. From the collapse of the Peace of Amiens Napoleon’s naval strategy had been marked by an utter disregard for realities, but this time he had excelled himself, timing his orders to arrive on the very day before Fremantle and the whole blockading fleet at last got their wish for Nelson. ‘On the 28th of September was joined by H.M. Ship Victory Admirl Lord Nelson,’ wrote James Martin, an able seaman in Neptune, ‘and the Ajax and the Thunderer it is Imposeble to Discribe the Heartfelt Satifaction of the whole fleet upon this Occasion and the Confidance of Success with which we ware Inspired.’
‘I think if you were to see the Neptune you would find her very much altered since you were on bd,’ Fremantle told Frank’s father, sloth, dyspepsia and ill-temper all dispersed by a single dinner with Nelson and the promise of the second place in the line in any coming action. ‘We are all now scraping the ship’s sides to paint like the Victory [black, with buff-coloured stripes running between the portholes], the fellows make such a noise I can hardly hear myself. Pray make my respects to Mrs Hastings & beg her [to have] no wit of apprehension about her son who has made many friends here, & who is able to take his own part.’
Opinions were still divided as to whether or not the French would come out, but with five ‘spy’ frigates posted close in to the city, and Nelson’s battle plan circulated among the captains, the fleet knew what was expected of them. In the brute simplicity of the tactics Hastings was to learn an invaluable lesson, but the great danger of breaking the line in the way Nelson intended was that it ceded the opening advantage to the enemy, exposing a sluggish handler like Neptune in the light October breezes to the full enemy broadsides for anything up to twenty minutes before she could get beneath a foe’s vulnerable stern.
Nobody in Neptune was under any illusion as to what that would mean, but nothing could contain the excitement when the signal from the inshore squadron finally came. ‘All hearts towards evening beat with joyful anxiety for the next day,’ Badcock wrote on 20 October, as Neptune answered the signal for a general chase, ‘which we hoped would crown an anxious blockade with a successful battle. When night closed in, the rockets and blue lights, with signal guns, informed us the inshore squadron still kept sight of our foes, and like good and watchful dogs, our ships continue to send forth occasionally a growly cannon to keep us on the alert, and to cheer us with the hope of a glorious day on the morrow.’
As partitions, furnishings and bulkheads were removed, decks cleared, livestock slaughtered – Fremantle had a goat on board that had provided him with milk – Neptune turned south-west to give her the weather gage in the coming action. From the signals of their ‘watchdogs’ they knew that the enemy were still moving in a southerly direction, and as dawn broke on 21 October, first one sail and then a whole ‘forest of strange masts’ appeared some eleven miles to leeward to show that the Combined Fleet was at last where Nelson wanted it.
The sun, William Badcock – midshipman of the forecastle and first in Neptune to see the enemy – remembered, ‘looked hazy and watery, as if it smiled in tears on many brave hearts which fate had decreed should never see it set … I ran aft and informed the officer of the watch. The captain was on deck in a moment, and ere it was well light, the signals were flying through the fleet to bear up and form the order of sailing in two columns.’
As the ship slipped into those atavistic rhythms that no one who witnessed them ever forgot, and hammocks were stowed, cutlasses and muskets distributed, powder horns and spare flintlocks issued, magazines and powder rooms unlocked, operating area prepared, and final letters written, full sail was set and Neptune strove to take her place in the line. In Nelson’s original battle plan Fremantle had been ordered to follow Temeraire, Superb and Victory in the weather division, but with only the short October day ahead of them, and speed crucial if the enemy were not to escape, precedence went out of the window in favour of an ad hoc order that left the two columns to sort themselves out, as sailing capacities dictated, behind Victory and the Royal Sovereign.
It was now that the ‘old Neptune, which never was a good sailer’, as William Badcock put it, ‘took it into her head to sail better that morning than I ever remembered’, and at about 10 a.m. she came up alongside Nelson’s Victory. Fremantle intended to ‘pass her and break the enemy’s line’, Badcock recalled, ‘but poor Lord Nelson hailed us from the stern-walk of the Victory, and said, “Neptune, take in your studding-sails and drop astern; I shall break the line myself.”’
It was probably the eleven-year-old Hastings’s sole glimpse of Nelson, but if he ever wondered what it was that gave him his unique hold over men, he did not have long to wait for an answer. As Neptune dropped astern of Victory, and the Temeraire slipped between them to take her place in the van, Nelson’s last signal before the order to ‘engage’ was relayed through the fleet. ‘At 11,’ the Neptune’s log laconically noted, ‘Answered the general signal, “England expects every man will do his duty”; Captain Fremantle inspected the different decks, and made known the above signal, which was received with cheers.’
He ‘addressed us at our Different Quarters in words few’, James Martin remembered, ‘but Intimated that … all that was Dear to us Hung upon a Ballance and their Happyness depended upon us and their safty allso Happy the Man who Boldly Venture his Life in such a Cause if he shold Survive the Battle how Sweet will be the Recolection be [sic] and if he fall he fall Covred with Glory and Honnor and Morned By a Greatfull Country the Brave Live Gloryous and Lemented Die.’
In the heavy swell and light winds – and to the sounds of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Britons Strike Home’ drifting across the water from ships’ bands – Neptune closed on the enemy with agonising slowness. ‘It was a beautiful sight,’ Badcock wrote,
when their line was completed; their broadsides turned towards us, showing their iron teeth, and now and then trying the range of a shot to ascertain the distance, that they might, the moment we came within point blank (about six hundred yards), open the fire upon our van ships … Some of them were painted like ourselves – with double yellow sides, some with a broad single red or yellow streak; others all black, and the noble Santissima Trinidada (158), with four distinct lines of red, with a white ribbon between … her head splendidly ornamented with a colossal group of figures, painted white, representing the Holy Trinity … This magnificent ship was destined to be our opponent.
It was not just a ‘beautiful sight’, but an exhilarating and terrifying one, and at the stately walking pace at which the fleets closed there was all the time in the world to take it in. At 11.30 Neptune’s log at last recorded the signal ‘to locate the enemy’s line, and engage to leeward’, and as first Victory and then Temeraire broke through ahead, and Neptune prepared to receive her opening broadsides, Fremantle ordered everyone, except the officers, to lie down to reduce casualties.
Until this moment Hastings had been on the quarterdeck with Fremantle, an unusually small, frightened and superfluous spectator, neatly dressed in the new suit Betsey Fremantle had had made for him, but to his future chagrin the First Lieutenant now ordered him to a safer circle of hell below. ‘A man should witness a battle in a three-decker from the middle deck,’ a young marine lieutenant in Victory later wrote, struggling to evoke the blind, smoke-filled, deafening chaos of the battle that awaited Hastings as he made his way down to the lower decks of Neptune,
for it beggars all description: it bewilders the senses of sight and hearing. There was the fire from above, the fire from below, besides the fire from the deck I was upon, the guns recoiling with violence, reports louder than thunder, the decks heaving and the sides straining. I fancied myself in the infernal regions, where every man appeared a devil. Lips might move, but orders and hearing were out of the question, everything was done by signs.
Even to those still on the quarterdeck, the smoke of battle and the tangle of fallen masts and rigging had already obscured Victory, but as Neptune closed on her target, the gap that Nelson had punched between Villeneuve’s Bucentaure and Redoubtable widened to welcome her. For the final ten minutes of her approach Neptune was forced to take the combined fire of three enemy ships, until at 12.35 she at last broke through astern of Bucentaure and, in the perfect tactical position, delivered a broadside from thirty yards’ range. ‘At 12.35, we broke their line,’ the log reads – a typical mix of understatement, spurious accuracy, guesswork and partial knowledge.
At 12.47, we engaged a two-deck ship, with a flag at the mizzen. At 1.30, entirely dismasted her, she struck her colours; and bore down and attacked the Santa Trinidada, a Spanish four-decker of 140 guns … raked her as we passed under her stern; and at 1.50 opened our fire on her starboard quarter. At 2.40, shot away her main and mizzen masts; at 2.50, her foremast; at 3, she cried for quarter, and hailed us to say they had surrendered; she then stuck English colours to the stump of her main mast; gave her three cheers.
Neptune herself was in little better shape – ‘standing and running rigging much cut; foretop-gallant and royal yard shot away … wounded in other places; fore yard nearly shot in two, and ship pulled in several places’ – but as the smoke cleared they caught their first overview of the shambles around them. ‘We had now Been Enverloped with Smoak Nearly three Howers,’ wrote James Martin. ‘Upon this Ships [Santa Trinidada] striking the Smoak Clearing a way then we had a vew of the Hostle fleet thay were scattred a Round us in all Directions Sum Dismasted and Sum were Compleat wrecks Sum had Left of Fireng and sum ware Engagen with Redoubled furey it was all most imposeble to Distinguish to what Nation thay Belonged.’
It was a momentary respite – ‘but a few minets to take a Peep a Round us’ – but in the midst of this chaos they could see Victory and Temeraire still ‘warmly engaged’ and, more critically, ‘the six van ships of the enemy bearing down to attack’ them. In his original memorandum Nelson had anticipated this second phase of the battle, and as separate ship-actions continued to the rear of them, Neptune, Leviathan, Conqueror and Agamemnon manoeuvred to form a rough line of defence. ‘At 3.30, opened fire on them,’ Neptune’s log continued, ‘assisted by the Leviathan and Conqueror; observed one of them to have all her masts shot away by our united fire.’
With nearly all her own sails shot away, however, and not ‘a brace or bowline left’, Neptune was in no state to give chase when the remaining enemy abandoned their attack and escaped to southward. For another hour or so the fight continued around them in a mix of close actions and long-range duels, but for Neptune – and, at 4.30, just a quarter of an hour after she had ceased firing, Nelson himself – the battle was over. ‘Three different powers to rule the main,’ ran a popular song reflecting on the fate of the three ‘Neptunes’ that had fought at Trafalgar,
Assumed old Neptune’s name:
One from Gallia, one from Spain,
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.
(#litres_trial_promo)
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.
