“This high man with a great thing to pursue,”[1] was never a trifler. He recognised the importance of a supreme navy and the supreme importance of its _personnel_. He watched the health of his men as a loving mother watches that of her children. Proof of this is furnished in a Report of the Physician to the Fleet, dated the 14th August 1805.[2] In it Dr Leonard Gillespie says that “the high state of health” was “unexampled perhaps in any fleet or squadron heretofore employed on a foreign station.” He attributes this to such causes as the attention paid to the victualling and purveying for the ships; a sane system of heating and ventilation; lack of idleness and intemperance, due to “the constant activity and motion in which the fleet was preserved”; the promotion of cheerfulness by means of music, dancing, and theatrical amusements; comfortable accommodation of the sick; and by the serving of Peruvian bark, mixed in wines or spirits, to men “employed on the service of wooding and watering,” which obviated any ill effects.
Nelson was quite able to “stand on his dignity,” to use a colloquial and comprehensive phrase, and several instances will be discovered by the reader as he peruses the following pages, but it is quite wrong to think that he was in the least a martinet. For instance, during the trying period when he was hungering for the French fleet to leave Toulon, he wrote to an officer: “We must all in our several stations exert ourselves to the utmost, and not be nonsensical in saying, ‘I have an order for this, that, or the other,’ if the king’s service clearly marks what ought to be done.” Everyone has heard how Nelson referred to his captains and himself as “a band of brothers.” You have only to turn to the memoirs of these gallant officers to learn the truthfulness of this remark. They loved him: that is the only term that exactly meets the case.
What of the humbler men who worked the ships? Read the following, which was sent home by a rough but large-hearted sailor of the _Royal Sovereign_, Collingwood’s flagship at Trafalgar, when he heard that the Master Mariner lay cold in the gloomy cockpit of the _Victory_: “Our dear Admiral is killed, so we have paid pretty sharply for licking ’em. I never set eyes on him, for which I am both sorry and glad; for to be sure I should like to have seen him--but then, all the men in our ship who have seen him are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed. God bless you! Chaps that fought like the Devil sit down and cry like a wench.”