18 - The Task

Summary

Nelson's main object, as he himself put it, was ‘to keep the French fleet in check and if they put to sea to annihilate them’. To do this, he had only a small battlefleet – nine ships to begin with and most of them in urgent need of refit – and the nearest base was many miles away from Toulon at Malta. So his first priority was to find a way of keeping his ships in fighting trim, without weakening his force by detaching too many of them at once. He achieved this by making use of the fine anchorage at Agincourt Sound in the Maddalena Islands on the north coast of Sardinia, and arranging for all his supplies to be sent to him there. In addition to well-equipped ships, he also needed healthy crews, and so much of his time was taken up with organising a regular supply of fresh food and in keeping his men amused and their morale high. As a result of his efforts, when Dr Gillespie arrived on board HMS Victory in January 1805, after she had been constantly at sea for over 18 months, he found only one man sick out of a ship's company of 840.

As well as being a good administrator, the Mediterranean commander had also to be a diplomat – and here Nelson showed a much surer touch than he had displayed during his previous time in the Mediterranean. Urgent invitations from the Queen of Naples to go ashore and recover his health in the city were politely rebuffed, and he never again allowed himself to become embroiled with the affairs of any one state, as in 1799. Instead, he maintained a voluminous correspondence with British ministers in all the main ports and with the rulers of the many states that came within his area. His efforts won him the approval of leading politicians back in Britain, and it was during this period that he consolidated his reputation among them for dependability, and for wisdom in public affairs, that led them to rely on his advice so much during the crisis of 1805.

We can follow him through all these tasks, and watch him balancing them and reflecting on them, through two sequences of private letters written in 1804 – to the Duke of Clarence and Lord Melville.