Roger Knight - The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE PURSUIT OF VICTORY

The flagship of the Nelson Fleet Independent , Books of the Year

This bicentenary of Trafalgar has been marked by a spate of first-class books None is better, though, than The Pursuit of Victory John Crossland, Sunday Times , Books of the Year

A marvellous read, intriguing, protean, with a constantly fresh eye for detail: very like its subject, really Richard Hill, Naval Review

The Pursuit of Victory stands out for its comprehensive and scholarly account Christopher Bland, Sunday Telegraph , Books of the Year

The best of the excellent crop of biographies and naval histories to appear in the bicentenary year of the battle of Trafalgar Jonathan Sumption, Spectator

This book is not only an ideal book of reference, it also makes history come alive in a most original way. To understand fully what this extraordinary man was all about, this book is the definitive article Royal Naval Sailing Association Journal

If you are looking for the definitive life, undoubtedly this is the one Peter Firth, Lloyds List

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Knight is one of Britains foremost experts on naval history and a renowned Nelson scholar. He was the Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the National Maritime Museum, London, from 1988 to 2000 and is now Visiting Professor of Naval History at the Greenwich Maritime Institute, University of Greenwich. He is also an experienced yachtsman, and has sailed most of the waters described in this book.

Roger Knight

The Pursuit of Victory

The Life and Achievement
of Horatio Nelson

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.co.uk

First published by Allen Lane 2005

Published in Penguin Books 2006

This edition is published without endnotes and bibliography. Readers wishing to consult the books sources and bibliography should refer to the hardback edition published by Allen Lane 2005.

Copyright Roger Knight, 2005

Maps copyright John Gilkes, 1005

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The acknowledgements on pp. 684687 constitute an extension of this copyright page

ISBN: 978-0-14-193788-5

Dedicated to the memory of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Lewin of Greenwich 1920-1999

Contents

Illustrations

.

Charts and Text Illustrations

Note on the Text

Quotations from contemporary documents are based on the originals as closely as possible. Capitals and spelling have been retained as written, except in the case of Jemmy Jameson, the master of the Boreas , whose spelling in his log was so wayward that making sense of it required decryption skills. Abbreviations have been clarified by the addition of letters within square brackets. Punctuation has had to be inserted very occasionally for the sake of clarity. Where documents have been quoted from printed sources, the editing and alterations of their authors inevitably have had to be used.

MONEY VALUES

The value of money in Nelsons time is difficult to establish because the relative value of particular commodities changed significantly over a long period of time. Regional price variations and the widespread custom of part-payment of wages by non-monetary means further complicate the picture.

The table in Rodger ( Command of the Ocean , xxivxxv) shows the pay of a junior naval captain at various dates from the seventeenth century to the early twenty-first. A captain was paid 200 in 1807 and 58,000 in 2003, which suggests that the value of the pound sterling has risen by a factor of about 290. This common-sense approach has much to commend it, though some historians would argue that the difference in the value of the pound between those days and today is much greater.

Acknowledgements

Hunting down Nelson manuscripts has taken me to far and interesting places. The most distant and beautiful was the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where I held a Visiting Fellowship in 2001 for a months productive work and stimulus from discussions with other fellows, and where I was made welcome by Roy Ritchie and his staff. At the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, John Dann and his colleagues cheerfully and enthusiastically made available their expertise and their wonderful eighteenth-century British collections, and staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard University were similarly helpful. Nor should I forget my two-months in 1993 as the Alexander Vietor Visiting Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, during a bracing New England spring, which gave me time to read widely as well as giving me respite from museum administration, and which enabled me to approach this book with a firm framework of ideas on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. A belated thanks is due to Norman Fiering and his staff, as well as to all these American scholars, archivists and librarians.

Archives and libraries in the United Kingdom, large and small, were supportive and efficient, and the National Archives at Kew and the British Library a pleasure to visit and swift to produce their documents. At the other end of the scale Christine Hiskey at Holkham in Norfolk, and Andrew Helme and Sue Miles at the Nelson Museum in Monmouth, smoothed the way to many documents. Matthew Sheldon at the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth not only produced documents efficiently but gave me ideas for other sources. Assistance beyond the call of duty came from Francesca Altman of the Norwich Castle Museum and Gallery, Jane Cunningham of the Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Richard Draisey of the Devon Record Office. Valuable help by e-mail from Adrian Webb at the Hydrographic Office at Taunton and Roger Bettridge at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies enabled me to gain access to their collections.

Former colleagues at the National Maritime Museum gave up their time freely. Pieter van der Merwe helped with pictures and was full of ideas; Richard Ormond and Roger Quarm were always on hand, while David Taylor has been unfailingly helpful. Gillian Hutchinson and Brian Thynne answered a stream of questions about charts. For help with the manuscripts produced in the Caird Library I have to thank Daphne Knott, Andrew Davis, Kiri Ross-Jones, among all the others, for producing manuscripts; on occasions they went to great lengths to help. Gill Davies and the librarians gave great service. Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby have been supportive, while it was a great comfort to be able to call upon the expertise of Brian Lavery and Liza Verity. Colin White generously and consistently shared his knowledge of Nelson documents, and was particularly helpful in providing transcripts from papers in the National Archives of Scotland. I must also thank Kevin Hall, who kept me afloat electronically throughout this project. At the Greenwich Maritime Institute at the University of Greenwich, where I now teach, Sarah Palmer, Dean Surtees and Suzanne Bowles put up with my absences, for the writing of this book ensured that this visiting professor was exactly that and no more.