Horatio on the Bridge

VICTORY: THE LIFE OF LORD NELSON (393 pp.)--Oliver Warner--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6.50).

A Lord Nelson is the name given in Royal Navy wardrooms to a poker hand containing three Jacks. In the British tradition of understatement, this may or may not bear reference to the fact that Horatio, Lord Nelson, was a man with one eye, one arm and one idea--to beat the French. The latest and one of the best of the great sailor's biographies logs in scholarly detail the main tacks of a gusty life that carried him to the top of the column in London's Trafalgar Square--not to mention the Nelson monument in Dublin, where James Joyce's hero, mindful of Lady Hamilton, referred to him as "the onehandled adulterer."

Nelson was born in 1758, at a time when Dr. Samuel Johnson could see little difference between life at sea and life in prison, except that at sea there was the added hazard of drowning. Yet Nelson, a parson's sickly son, lived to cast an aura of gaiety and gallantry over the squalid business of being a ship's officer. He was a prudent sailor, a superb professional in the chancy matters of wind, tide, hemp, oak, canvas and gunpowder, at a time when a man-o'-war was a floating firecracker rather than a seagoing IBM machine. Nelson could tell changes in weather by twinges in his stump of arm (my "fin") as well as by the ship's barometer.

In terms of the naval discipline of the time he had to be a brute, and he could order a sentence of what amounted to death by torture (i.e., 250 lashes of a cat-o'-nine-tails) for a seaman caught looting.

Yet he was, within his code, a gentle man, beloved by officers and crew. His sailors were "brave fellows" and a "band of brothers." Nelson set a good table and a stern example. That he lived to save Europe from Napoleon is something of a miracle, and British Biographer Warner (a naval buff from the time he sat at Caius College, Cambridge, beneath a portrait of Nelson's father) has shown a hagiographer's diligence in turning over the records of England's seagoing lay saint.

Billows & Pillows. In his portrait, Author Warner tells a great many of the old Nelson stories, and some unfamiliar ones. Example: as a midshipman at 14, Nelson found himself on an expedition to the Arctic. He tried to kill a polar bear to get its skin for his father. He missed the beast with his first shot and wanted to clobber it with a clubbed musket.

The shrewdness, bravery and romanticism of such escapades Nelson wore through life like his own elegant uniforms. He served as a ship's captain at 20, and soon earned his rank in an insane bit of primitive amphibious warfare in the West Indies. (Yellow Jack killed most of his comrades.) He lost the sight of his right eye as a result of a wound suffered during the siege of Calvi on Corsica, and his arm storming the fortified town of Tenerife with a force of sailors in longboats.

It was after the Battle of the Nile --in which Nelson canceled Napoleon's Egyptian victory by destroying the French fleet in Aboukir Bay--that the great sailor went to convalesce in Naples. There he met Lady Hamilton, sportive wife of the British Minister. Soon, Lady Hamilton was "all be-Nelsoned" with gold anchors on her shawls, and the "softest pillows" were prepared for him at the British Embassy. But Biographer Warner's cool picture of the morals of a time when men took their own marriage counsel demolishes the notion that in his affair with her, Nelson seriously wronged his friend, Sir William Hamilton. Emma Hamilton was a blacksmith's daughter who danced a legendary dance (naked and on a table) for the cronies of her "protector," Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh. Sir William, some 30 years her senior, did not expect to keep his wife out of circulation forever.

Simplicity of Mind. Nelson sailed for two years outside Toulon, blockading the fleet with which Napoleon hoped to invade England. Nelson battle-trained his squadrons while Admiral Villeneuve's sailors were seasick in harbor. A man of many proud boasts, Nelson made his proudest to the effect that his two-year blockade of the French invasion fleet "never cost a sailor a tear nor the nation a farthing."

The Duke of Wellington's judgment of Nelson, after a brief chance meeting, was "vain and silly." The judgment was revised to "officer and statesman" after the soldier got closer to the sailor. Both judgments were correct, for Nelson did have his silly side--as when he earnestly referred to Emma Hamilton as a saint. But after his words and his victories have been spelled out, what stays in the mind is the image of his "grey geese" (Nelson's fanciful name for his fleet), of those decks where they put out more flags and heard more bands to offset the bloodshed. Nelson had the historic and histrionic good fortune to die on the decks of the Victory at Trafalgar. With a bullet in his spine, he lived long enough to speak some famous last words to his flag-captain ("Kiss me, Hardy") and to know that he had saved England from invasion.

To Nelson, there was nothing ideological about the Napoleonic Wars. His simplicity of mind would have astonished the Emperor--the politician of ideas and master juggler of loyalties. Once when a young officer expressed ideas that sounded Whiggish (i.e., Liberal, and thus possibly pro-French), Nelson undertook to set things to rights. "There are three things, young gentleman," he said, "you are constantly to bear in mind: first, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety; secondly, you must consider every man as your enemy who speaks ill of your King; and thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman as you do the devil!"

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