Roger Knight |
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Roger Knight is one of Britain’s foremost experts on naval history and a renowned Nelson scholar. He was the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the National Maritime Museum from 1988 to 2000 and is now Visiting Professor of Naval History at the Greenwich Maritime Institute. He is also an experienced yachtsman, and has cruised most of the waters described in The Pursuit of Victory (Penguin, 2005).
Piece by Roger Knight, author of The Pursuit of Victory
Sailing in Nelson’s Wake
I have been fortunate in being able to sail in many of those waters where Nelson went before me. When I was thirteen and fourteen, I learnt to sail in the grey, tidal waters of the river Medway where Nelson – at the same age – had charge of the cutter and the decked longboat belonging to his uncle’s ship, the Raisonable, moored at Chatham. He, though, was also learning the essence of leadership, for he had a crew to command; my sailing was done in the family sixteen-foot Wayfarer dinghy. Nevertheless, throughout the writing of The Pursuit of Victory my sailing experience and knowledge of those waters which Nelson knew has influenced the way in which I looked at his life and career.
As I progressed to bigger yachts and longer cruises, I had the advantages of a modern depth sounder and a diesel engine. Nelson put his ship aground several times in his career, for all he had to rely on was an attentive seaman swinging the lead and a sharp-eyed midshipman at the foretop – and his own instinct and experience. Recently I went sailing in the American Virgin islands where he had sailed in the Boreas in 1784, surveying the island of St. Johns and his chart is in the archives. He marked a spot on the chart : ‘The rock where the ship Boreas struck’. But in wartime he had to take risks and I can only admire his nerve. For instance, at the beginning of the French Revolutionary War, the young captain took the Agamemnon over the Channel off Cherbourg, and pursued some small French vessels right up to the drying harbour at St. Vaast. ‘Had the ship touched the ground she must inevitably have been lost’, he reported to his admiral. I know he was not exaggerating.
But it was in the Mediterranean where Nelson made his reputation, where the heat and high coastlines make for treacherous and sudden winds. At first when he was captain of the Agamemnon he was taken by surprise by the strong winds which suddenly blow, and then abruptly change direction, and his ship was damaged several times. I experienced such winds in the 1980s when sailing between Corsica and Sardinia. I also sailed through Agincourt Sound in the Maddelena Islands where Nelson regularly brought his ships to get re-supplied and watered when he was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Nelson kept on learning how to keep the sea. By the time of his most spectacular victory in 1798, the battle of the Nile, he knew the vagaries of the weather, the sudden setting of the sun in these latitudes, the way in which the winds bend with the shape of the land, and the cardinal rule that when you have a good breeze you do not waste it. It was these sea conditions that shaped his decisions to go straight into Aboukir Bay, taking the French by surprise, a defeat from which they never recovered.
A great contrast with the high coastline around the Mediterranean is the low Danish coast near Copenhagen, the scene of one of his battles in 1801. No wonder he had difficulty in finding deep water; beating through the Sound into the Baltic, as I did as crew on a wonderful Swan 44 in the 1990s, I could hardly make out the Trekroner fort in the harbour which guarded the city, the guns of which wrought havoc on some of Nelson’s ships. These are very difficult waters.
The sea, with its currents, tides and sudden changes of mood does not change. Today we have many advantages with the modern navigational and weather forecasting. Nelson had to be his own meteorologist and one is left with admiration at his exploits and those of other officers and men of the time. Even today one should never relax. As one old admiral once remarked: ‘The sea signs no treaties’.
