THE GLORY OF NELSON
Two centuries after the Battle of Trafalgar we are remembering its winner,
the great British Admiral Horatio Nelson.
Horatio Nelson was born on September 29, 1758, the sixth of eleven children
of a village priest Edmund Nelson and his wife Catherine. He was
a sickly child from the start and grew up small and slender. After his
mother’s death  Horatio
asked his uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, to take him to sea. At
19, Horatio was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant and two years later
he “made post” achieving the rank of Captain, made a frigate commander
and talking part in a naval operation against Spanish settlements in Nicaragua.
The attack on San Juan was a military success but, overall, ended up as
a total disaster with yellow fever epidemic literally decimating the British
expeditionary force. Nelson escaped unharmed, though, and shortly after,
during a mission to the West Indies, he made the acquaintance of a young
widow by the name of Fanny Nisbet. After two years of courting, Nelson,
captivated by Fanny’s five-year-old son, Josiah, married her. In 1793,
already the commander of the 64-gun H.M.S. Agamemnon, Nelson was dispatched
to the Mediterranean to fight the Revolutionary French and help Britain’s
allies.
In Naples he met Emma Hamilton, the young wife of Sir William Hamilton.
Their romance has since inspired a plethora of books. In one of the
battles Nelson was wounded in the head by a French bullet that forever
cost him the sight of his right eye. On February 14, 1798 fifteen
British ships routed a 27-ship-strong Spanish flotilla off Cape Saint Vincent.
Nelson’s flagship took on seven enemy ships and captured two of them.
For that victory Horatio Nelson was knighted and promoted to the rank of
Rear Admiral. The very first battle he fought in his new capacity,
at Santa Cruz de Tenerife concluded with Nelson badly wounded, his right
arm so badly mangles that it could not be saved.
Back to the Mediterranean, Admiral Nelson chased the French fleet to Egypt
and crushed them in the Battle of the Nile. For that feat he was given
the title of Baron Nelson of the Nile, other distinctions as well as dozens
of brightly colored waits belts embroidered by patriotically-minded ladies.
He even got a diamond-studded peacock presented him by the appreciative
Turkish Sultan. His best loved souvenir, however, was the one he got from
Captain Hallowell, another hero of the Battle of the Nile. At the height
of the battle a British cannonball got right inside the powder magazine
of the French flagship. The explosion hurled parts of the French ship’s
mast onto the deck of captain Hallowell ship. Knowing full well how to
please his commander, Hallowell had a coffin cut out of the French mast
and sent it to Nelson with a message saying that “when You get tired of
life You will be buried inside one of Your trophies”. Nelson liked
the gift immensely and placed the coffin right in his cabin for everyone
to see. Before the next battle he had his name engraved on the casket’s
lid.
It looks like this man’s entire life was one long preparation for a glorious
death. By the age of 20 he had already had two close calls, both
times due to the fever he contracted in India and Nicaragua. Once, at a
London party, the one-eyed and one-armed Admiral so much impressed Lady
Spencer that she told her friends about her charming new friend and that
she would be waiting to meet him again if there would be something left
of him by then. Speaking about himself, Nelson would always refer to himself
in the third person as if he were already preparing to write his own obituary.
Nelson’s desire to die a glorious death came very true during the famous
Battle of Trafalgar when he was struck down by a sniper’s bullet. Defying
a longtime naval tradition demanding that before a battle officers remove
their distinctions, Nelson remained in his shiny epaulets and the four
big silver stars shining on his chest. All that brilliance was not
lost on the French sniper who fired a bullet that, cutting through the
Admiral’s epaulet, hit his spinal chord and became lodged in the spinal
muscles.
Thanks to Nelson’s strategic genius the British were gaining the upper
hand over the enemy. Just as the Admiral’s heart had stopped beating, the
18th French warship threw out the white flag. By nightfall it was
all over and the French and Spanish fleet literally obliterated from the
face of the sea in one of the biggest and politically significant sea battles
ever fought. Shortly before dying, Nelson asked to be buried in England.
Captain Hardy fulfilled the last wish of his commander and good friend.
They placed Nelson’s body in a cask of brandy and took it to London. Before
that happened, however, the severely battered flagship, H.M.S. Victory
had to stop over at Gibraltar for repairs. Only on December 5 did the ship
finally cast anchor at Portsmouth. The funeral was on January 9 of 1806.
Nelson’s longtime dream of someday finding eternal peace at the Westminster
Abbey did not come true, though, and he was buried inside London’s imposing
St. Paul’s Cathedral.
In London there is a huge column surrounded by fountains and bronze lions
overlooking Trafalgar Square. The granite column if 185 feet high surmounted
by a statue of Lord Nelson. Looking small from down below the statue is
actually three times the average man’s height and is cast from French cannons
seized during the Battle of Trafalgar. This is a tall column and, standing
on its top, the Admiral can see the ocean…
08/17/2005
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