Nelson's Hero: The Story of His 'Sea-Daddy' Captain William Locker

By Victor T. Sharman

Horatio Nelson's first captain was William Locker who recognised the exceptional talents of the young midshipman who was to become the most famous sailor in history. Thirty-seven years later Admiral Lord Nelson wrote to Locker 'I have been your scholar; it was you who taught me to board a Frenchman by your conduct It is you who always taught me to lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him. My only merit in my profession is being a good scholar'. Captain William Locker's career as a Sea Captain fighting the King's enemies on the high seas makes gripping reading and high drama.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 31, 1990
• ISBN: 9781473816718

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Author’s Preface

Like many Englishmen, I have always nursed a love of the sea, and the sight of ‘Tall Ships’ has always thrilled me. Nevertheless, my main interest in history was always the Tudor court, and although I thought I knew Nelson’s story, it was not until a good friend gave me Carola Oman’s biography Nelson, which brought the same magic to his story as had Edith Sitwell’s The Queens and the Hive with its telling of the story of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, Leicester and Essex etc., that the true epic character of Nelson’s nature captivated me.

In reading Carola Oman, I was much struck by a letter from Nelson to Captain William Locker written after the Battles of Cape St Vincent and the Nile:

Palermo

February 2nd, 1799

To William Locker

My dear Friend,

I well know your own goodness of heart will make all due allowances for my present situation, and that I truly have not all the time or power to answer all the letters I receive at the moment; but you, my old friend, after twenty-seven years acquaintance know that nothing can alter my attachment and gratitude to you:

I have been your scholar; it is you who taught me to board a Frenchman, by your conduct in the Experiment*, it is you who always told me, ‘Lay a Frenchman close, and you will beat him’ and my only merit in my profession is being a good scholar; our friendship will never end but with my life; but you have always been too partial to me …

… believe me ever your faithful and affectionate friend,

NELSON

While I later came to realize that this letter was well-known and, indeed is strongly featured at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, I was surprised to find, in later searches, that there was no biography of this clearly important figure in Nelson’s career, other than a character sketch by his son, Edward Hawke Locker, in a collection of such sketches entitled Lives of Distinguished Naval Commanders. (Several copies of this are held by the Caird Library at the NMM.) Being active in a commercial career at the time, I put this thought to the back of my mind, with the intention of ‘some day’ writing Locker’s story. Years went by, and a remarkable coincidence brought him to my notice again. I had invited the Chief Architect of a national company to visit our plant and, since he had a long journey, suggested he might like to bring his wife and stay as our guest in a local (Portsmouth) hotel. On collecting them from their hotel the following morning and asking whether they had slept well and had a good breakfast, the architect replied that they had risen early and had gone for a walk on Southsea Beach. I casually asked them if they knew that the day before Nelson’s fleet was to sail for what would eventually end in the Battle of Trafalgar, it had been necessary, due to the vast crowds pressing in on Portsmouth harbour to see Nelson board the Victory, for him to be rowed out from the shingle of Southsea Beach. The couple looked at each other and the architect asked if I had a special interest in Nelson. I naturally told them a little of my particular interest in the untold story of Locker, only to learn that his wife, Patricia, whose maiden name was Locker, was a direct descendant of his, and they had been trying for years to learn more of him themselves. Sadly the lady died some few years ago and I have only been able to pass on my researches to her family.

Thus galvanized, I began to seek out the background of this remarkable man, and his own story, since the action which stirred and influenced Nelson took place the year before he was born, and Locker himself was forty-six years old when they met. I was fortunate enough, by appealing to the readers of the Navy News, to locate Lieutenant Commander Locker Madden, RN, Rtd and when he contacted me he was kind enough to pass on invaluable background details of his forebear’s life and descendants which have enabled me to complete this book. Later a letter of mine to The Times concerning a mention of Locker in their columns, caused other descendants to contact me – an altogether unexpected but delightful experience which has enabled me to put them in touch with each other. A telephone call from The Nelson Society led to my joining the society, and to my slight bemusement it was not long before I found myself elected Chairman – a much appreciated honour.

Of necessity, in relating Nelson’s and Locker’s relationship over so many years, it has been necessary to re-tell many episodes which have been ‘oft told’, and these will be second nature to all devotees of Nelson and his times. The accounts of the sea battles, engagements etc. have been culled from many sources and I fully acknowledge the many authors whose works I have called upon. All are listed in the bibliography at the end of this volume. (‘Nelsonites’ may wish to start this book at Chapter Two which begins Locker’s life.) However, what is of unique interest is that Nelson frequently wrote to Locker within days of an action to give his friend his own account, and to comment on events. He also gave his opinions on the politics and personalities involved which, whilst outlined elsewhere, have not been recorded in such particular detail. Whilst I am no academic historian, I do have a love of my subject, and have endeavoured to give proper citations wherever possible to assist the reader. In researching the lengthy correspondence I was also much struck by the letter which Nelson sent to John Locker, the eldest son, the day following his father’s death. He wrote that Locker, whom he had regarded as his ‘sea-daddy’, was:

… a man whom to know was to love, and those who only heard of him honoured. The greatest consolation to us, his friends who remain, is, that he has left a character for honour and honesty which none can surpass, and very, very few attain.

I have used actual spelling and grammar in all contemporary letters quoted (viz ‘cruizing’ rather than cruising and ‘chace’ rather than chase.) In the case of place names I have used the [sic] notation wherever this is relevant; such as ‘Martinico’ where Martinique is meant by the writer.

It may be helpful to new readers to know that what is now generally known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic (both situated on the island of Hispaniola) was, in Nelson’s time, referred to as both Hispaniola and Santo Domingo. Cape Nicola Mola (or St Nicolas Mole), the scene of Nelson’s early prize, is situated on the extreme western coast of Haiti, and Santo Domingo on the south-east of the Dominican Republic. Due to the strong trade winds, and the necessity of ships having to make their passages between the islands in the 2,500 mile-long archipelago which make up the West Indies, the Admiralty divided the Caribbean into two commands – the Leeward Island Station covering the eastern area and the Jamaica Station covering the west, and based on St Nicolas Mole.

___________

*See footnote p. xii

*Captain Locker was 1st Lieutenant of the Experiment of 20 guns, and 142 men, (Captain Sir John Strachan) on 19 June 1757, when she fell in with Le Telemaque, a large French ship of 26 guns, and 460 men, which was boarded and captured by the Experiment’s crew, led by Locker.

Chapter One

A Young Man Goes To Sea

Nelson first met William Locker when, as a newly qualified young lieutenant he was appointed to the Lowestoffe, a frigate commanded by Locker. After achieving fame in later life, Nelson was asked to write a brief history¹ of himself in which he wrote:

On the 8th April, 1777, I passed my examination and received my commission the next day as Second Lieutenant of the Lowestoffe Frigate of 32 guns², Captain (afterwards Lieutenant Governor of the Royal Hospital, Greenwich) William Locker. In this Ship I went to Jamaica: but even a Frigate was not sufficiently active for my mind, and I got into a schooner³, tender to the Lowestoffe. In this vessel I made myself a complete pilot for all the passages through the (Keys) Islands situated on the north side Hispaniola. Whilst in this Frigate, an event happened which presaged my character; and, as it conveys no dishonour to the Officer alluded to, I shall insert it.

Blowing a gale of wind, and very heavy sea, the frigate captured an American letter of marque⁴. The First Lieutenant was ordered to board her, which he did not do, owing to the very heavy sea. On his return, the Captain [i.e. Locker] said ‘Have I no Officer in the Ship who can board the Prize?’ On which the Master ran to the gangway, to get into the boat: when I stopped him, saying, ‘It is my turn now; and if I come back it is yours’. This little incident has often occurred to my mind, and I know it is my disposition, that difficulties and dangers do but increase my desire of attempting them.

Nelson was born on 29 September 1758 and, as a child, had been brought up at The Parsonage in Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk where he had been born and where his father, the Reverend Edmund Nelson, was Rector. He was the third of five sons in a family of eight children – the two eldest brothers dying in infancy. His mother, Catherine, was the daughter of Dr Maurice Suckling, Prebendary of Westminster and Rector of Barsham in Suffolk, whose wife Anne, was a niece of Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Oxford.

Nelson was nine years old when his mother died, aged forty-two, on Boxing Day 1767, having borne eleven children in seventeen years.⁵ His father, who has been described as ‘gentle, pious, strict and rather impractical’, thus found himself, at forty-six years old, sole parent to eight children, the youngest of whom was only ten months old. Five days later Catherine’s mother also passed away.

Nelson’s maternal uncle was Captain Maurice Suckling (1725–78), Dr Suckling’s second son, who had been Captain of the Dreadnought on 21 October 1759 when, with two other 60-gun ships, they had engaged and bested a vastly superior French squadron in West Indian waters. Whilst the anniversary of this day was always celebrated in the Nelson household, it is ironic that it was also to be the day on which Nelson finally fell. It was in that same year (1759) that the Victory was ordered by the Admiralty. Captain Suckling, who served in the Channel Fleet under Admiral Lord Hawke, was married to his cousin, the daughter of Horatio, Lord Walpole of Wolferton – after whom the young Nelson was named, although the family always called him Horace.

In the winter of 1770–71, whilst the Rector was taking a recuperating break in Bath, the young Horatio and his brother William read in a local newspaper that the Raisonnable (64 guns) was being recommissioned in view of possible war with Spain over their claim to the Falklands. Her captain was to be Captain Maurice Suckling. The ship had been captured from the French in the year of Nelson’s birth, and had retained her name as was often the custom. Nelson urged his brother to write to their father and say that he, Horatio, would like to go to sea with his uncle.

The Rector, with so many mouths to feed, complied, and in due course received a reply from his late wife’s brother, a hearty man, which famously read ‘What has poor Horace done, who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come; and the first time we go into action, a cannon-ball may knock off his head, and provide for him at once.’

Nelson was rated aboard the Raisonnable on 1 January 1771 – a little over twelve years of age. Although his name was entered on her books, he returned to school until joining the ship in March. Officially, no youngster under the age of thirteen was allowed to go to sea in a Royal Navy vessel unless he was the son of a serving officer. In later years Lord Nelson, when a Rear-Admiral, at a special anniversary dinner on board HMS Foudroyant for survivors of the Battle of Cape St Vincent on St Valentine’s Day in 1797, was placed next to a young midshipman. Nelson remarked that for the young man to have been at that battle he must have gone to sea at a very early age. The young man replied ‘Eleven years, my Lord’. ‘Much too young’ said Nelson.

The basic fare for the men and young boys of the Royal Navy of this period was beef and pork – which would have been pickled in brine or saltpetre – pease-pudding, biscuits and oatmeal. This would have been washed down with beer, cheap wine, or grog – a mixture of rum and water, the mixture being dependent upon age and rank – the men receiving a gill of rum a day, half in the dinner hour and half in the evening. Beer was supplied liberally as it was thought to be a preventative for scurvy, and the pickled meats – even though these would be soaked in water before cooking – meant they would always be thirsty. Their usual allowance was one gallon of beer, or a pint of wine, or half-pint of spirits per man per day. The biscuits were usually held in large stores, some held over from war-stocks of indeterminate age, and all infested with weevils which tasted bitter, and made the throat dry. Bread was infested with maggots, known as bargemen, and what butter they had ‘turned to train-oil as they went south’.⁶

Water was carried in casks, and would often be verging on the putrid. A captain on any voyage was always on the lookout for an opportunity to replenish the casks with fresh water and in times of severe shortage the crew might be rationed to one pint of water per day per man. The men had many names for the various guises in which their food would appear – scotch coffee, burgoo (a kind of porridge), lobscouse and skillygolee – consisting of lumps of boiled meat floating in a porridge flavoured with sugar or vinegar. Canned meat was not introduced until 1813. When the allowances of beef and pork were low, there was always the rats. Nearly all contemporary writers speak of the rats, and Gardner says these were sometimes even eaten in the wardroom. Raigersfeld ate them and found them good, ‘fully as good as rabbit’⁷ but since the rats had earlier fed on the ship’s bread, biscuits and peas this is not so remarkable. The ‘captain of the hold’ would catch them and lay them out as in a market. These rats were known in the service as ‘Millers’ due to their diet. Ships could be overrun by them, and whilst 100 rats caught was not unusual, the official rat-catcher to His Majesty’s Royal Navy listed catches ranging from 171 from the Victory to 1,015 from the Prince of Wales, and a horrifying 2,475 from the Duke.⁸ Whether the man was paid by his own reports or actual tails presented might make a difference!

A twelve year old boy, later killed at Trafalgar, wrote to his parents: ‘We live on beef which has been ten or eleven years in the cask, and biscuit which makes your throat cold in eating because of the maggots which are very cold when you eat them – like calf’s foot jelly or blomage [sic] – we drink wine which is exactly like bullock’s blood and sawdust mixed together.’ However, life for most children in the late eighteenth century was hard, and the human spirit is a remarkably resilient thing. The journal of The Nelson Society, The Nelson Dispatch (July 1997 edition), records the recollections of his early life by Vice Admiral William Stanhope Lovell who, in 1789, left his family home in Little Missenden, Bucks, at the age of ten, and was handed over by his father at Portsmouth to the mercies of the gun-room of HMS Renown (74 guns) where he was to live the life of a midshipman for some years. He admitted to shedding tears of homesickness for his parents, but he later recalled ‘Time however, reconciles us to everything, and the gaiety of youth added to the new cocked hat, dirk, spyglass etc. of a nautical fit-out assisted wonderfully to dry my tears’. Life aboard had its own sources of amusement for the crew when the day’s work was done. A fiddler or a piper would play a tune to set up a jig or hornpipe, at which many of the crew, especially of those used to working aloft on yards and spars in constant motion, would be adept. On larger ships a band would be provided, and the officers would gather to listen and sometimes applaud the men enjoying themselves. Only the captain held himself aloof, forced by custom and expedience to keep to his solitary life – ever present but ever set apart, occasionally inviting the doctor and the first lieutenant to dinner. The endless repetition of the same small talk would only serve to accentuate the loneliness of his position; a position that was further underlined by the posting of a marine sentry outside his door.

The Raisonnable did not see action however, and Nelson only served as midshipman aboard her for five months and a day. Whilst Captain Suckling was given command of the Triumph, a guardship lying in the Thames estuary, (and entered Nelson’s name on her books as ‘Captain’s Servant’) he recommended the lad to John Rathbone, a former master’s mate and an excellent seaman from the Dreadnought under his command, who was now a ship’s captain. With Rathbone, the young Nelson voyaged ‘from Florida to Venezuela, and through the Bahamas and Lesser Antilles’.⁹

Nelson returned to the Triumph in July 1772 a fitter lad, and his uncle altered the boy’s rating on her books to that of midshipman. In Nelson’s own words:

If I did not improve in my education, I returned a practical Seaman, with a horror of the Royal Navy, and with a saying ‘Aft the most honour, forward the better man’. It was many weeks before I got in the least reconciled to a Man-of-War, so deep was the prejudice rooted; and what pains were taken to instil the principle in a young mind! However, as my ambition was to be a Seaman, it was always held out as a reward, that if I attended well to my navigation, I should go in the cutter and decked longboat, which was attached to the Commanding Officer’s [i.e. Suckling’s] ship at Chatham. Thus by degrees I became a good pilot, for vessels of that description, from Chatham to the Tower of London, down the Swin and the North Foreland; and confident of myself amongst rocks and sands.¹⁰

The young Nelson contrived to join an expedition to the Arctic where his encounter with a polar bear took place, and on the ships’ return to England in the middle of October 1773, Nelson learned that a squadron under Commander Sir Edward Hughes was fitting out for the East Indies, and the young lad was keen to join up. One of Nelson’s fellow midshipmen on this voyage was Thomas Troubridge who became one of his warmest friends and served under him as one of his captains, notably during the Battle of Cape St Vincent. It was on this voyage that Nelson went down with a fever which produced a temporary paralysis – it nearly ended his career then and there, and was to change his fine physical condition to that of ‘almost a skeleton’ as the Chief Surgeon who examined him noted. This condition, exacerbated by malaria was to affect him for the rest of his life, and forever leave him with a slight frail figure and fragile air. In 1776 the ship’s surgeon recommended his return home, and he was transferred to the Dolphin in the care of Captain James Pigott, for the six-months’ voyage back to England; a vital convalescence for the sickly youth. Nelson later wrote that Pigott’s kindness saved his life.

He returned, much restored, to find that his uncle, Captain Suckling, had succeeded Sir Hugh Palliser as Comptroller of the Navy. His uncle’s new position was to stand Nelson in very good stead, and advance his naval career considerably. At that time the entire business of shipbuilding and repairs, and the mustering and appointment of men, was left entirely to the Navy Office by the Admiralty. Thus the influence which was wielded by the head of the Navy Office, i.e. the Comptroller, was substantial and, in some respects, more powerful than that of the First Lord of the Admiralty. Nelson was immediately appointed by Admiral Sir James Douglas to act as Fourth (Acting) Lieutenant of the Worcester (64 guns), which was about to sail for Gibraltar and his appointment was dated from the same day as the Dolphin was paid off at Woolwich on 24 September 1776. It is interesting that the very first letter by Nelson to the Admiralty – held by the National Archives – is a request from him to Phillip Stephens requesting he be paid as Fourth Lieutenant ‘during the time I belong’d to her’.¹¹ The diary of the Worcester’s captain, Captain Mark Robinson, shows that on 8 October Mr Horatio Nelson joined his ship at Portsmouth ‘bearing letters from his uncle’. The following day Captain Robinson introduced Nelson to Sir James Douglas, and wrote a letter to Captain Suckling. The next evening, after the ship had been provisioned, the captain of the Worcester entertained two guests at dinner – the Mayor of Portsmouth and the Comptroller’s nephew. The hospitality was returned the next evening by the Mayor, who dined both the Captain and Nelson. This gesture was repeated within the week before the ship sailed, the Mayor happy to include the Comptroller’s nephew since he was aware that Captain Suckling was likely shortly to become Member of Parliament for Portsmouth.¹²

The Worcester came within sight of Gibraltar in the second week of the New Year, and Acting Lieutenant Nelson was sent ashore with letters for the British Consul at Cadiz. Captain Robinson reported that he was as happy when Mr Nelson was on deck in charge of a watch as with any other officer in his ship.

Following a stormy winter at sea, the ship returned to Portsmouth on 2 April 1777. Nelson had now been at sea for sufficient years, and in suitable positions on board Royal Navy ships, to enable him to sit his examination to become a substantive lieutenant. If a midshipman could not find a berth on a ship, then he remained a midshipman without rank; the saying was ‘You could not break a midshipman unless you broke his neck’. In order to qualify as a lieutenant, a midshipman had to have served a minimum of six years at sea on Royal Navy vessels – of which at least two had to be served as midshipman or with Master’s Mate rating – and to be able to produce the relevant ‘ship’s muster’ (complement) books to prove this. Nelson’s examination for his lieutenant’s certificate took place on 9 April 1777 and covered the period June 1762 to April 1777. The Certificate he gained read as follows:

In pursuance, &c, of the 5th April 1777, we have examined Mr. Horatio Nelson, who by certificate appears to be more