If we have talents,” wrote Horatio Nelson on 13 January 1804, “we have no right to keep them under a bushel, they are ours for the benefit of the Community.”
Those few words perfectly sum up Vice Admiral Nelson’s extraordinary, and lifelong, devotion to duty and public service. And yet, those words will not be found in any of the hundreds of biographies that have sought to unravel his mystery. Nor will they be found in any collected edition of his letters. They will not be found even in the great collections of Nelson archives at the National Maritime Museum or the British Library. They are found, in fact, in a hitherto unpublished letter preserved in the Henry Huntington Collection of Manuscripts in the splendid Hunting- ton Library in San Marino, California. The letter was written not to a fellow Englishman but to a Dane—Major General Ernest Frederick Waltersdorff, Chamberlain to the King of Denmark.
The two men met during the Baltic campaign of 1801, when Waltersdorff was one of the Danish representatives who negotiated the armistice with Britain following the Battle of Copenhagen on 2 April of that year. They obviously liked each other, for Nelson presented the Danish general’s son with a medal commemorating the Battle of the Nile and a copy of a brief autobiographical sketch he had written for The Naval Chronicle in 1799. Waltersdorff’s effusive letter of thanks for “the distinguished favor” now is in the William Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Again, it has never been published.
The presence of these important Nelson papers in the United States illustrates the extent to which he has become an international hero. Indeed, there are four significant public collections of his letters on this side of the Atlantic and at least two private ones. The 1805 Club, a society devoted, among other aims, to promoting new research about Nelson’s career and those who served with him, has an active U.S. membership. And, as the 200th anniversary of his great victory and death at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 approaches, it already is clear that the bicentenary will be celebrated not just in Britain but also in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Gibraltar, Malta, the United States, and elsewhere. Even Spain is planning a major event at sea off Cape Trafalgar itself on 21 October 2005 to honor the many heroes—Spanish, British, and French—who lost their lives on both sides of the great conflict.
In Britain, plans already are well advanced for making 2005 a special “Year of the Sea,” when the whole nation will be invited to celebrate its remarkable maritime heritage, which has done so much to shape British life and culture. At the heart of that celebration will be the Trafalgar Festival, an ambitious program of Nelson- related events ranging from special yacht races, historical reenactments, and parades as well as concerts, fireworks, and celebration dinners.
The festival will have a serious side, too. The organizers are determined there will be a lasting legacy—a greater understanding of Nelson and the Royal Navy of his times. There are to be international conferences to examine his career, a major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and, of course, a flood of new books. Indeed, that flood already has begun, with two major new biographies: Terry Coleman’s controversial Nelson: The Man and the Legend (London: Bloomsbury, 2001) and Edgar Vincent’s more traditional take, Nelson: Love and Fame (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2003). [See Book Reviews, pp. 60-62.]
Is there really anything new to be discovered about Nelson? Until recently, most historians would have answered no. New biographies can offer 2 fresh insights, as both Coleman’s and Vincent’s have done, but they have a been based, very largely, on familiar and much-harvested published sources. In the past few months, however, this old consensus has been blown out of the water by news of a remarkable discovery.
Three years ago, the National Maritime and Royal Naval Museums invited me to undertake The Nelson Letters Project. My task was to revisit all the Nelson archives in Britain and overseas, to identify new material and, where appropriate, to publish what I found. My interim findings have just been released and they have come as a surprise to even the most experienced Nelson scholars. I already have located more than 1,000 unpublished letters, and the figure is rising steadily with each archive that is visited. This represents an increase in available Nelson material of more than 15%, so it is by far the most significant addition to the Nelson canon since the publication of the great seven-volume collected edition of his correspondence by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas in 1844-’46.
The most dramatic and headline-grabbing new find was my discovery, in the archive of the National Maritime Museum, of a rough sketch drawn by Nelson in August or September 1805 to illustrate the tactics he intended to use at his next battle—the famous “Nelson Touch.” But there have been many other fascinating discoveries. For example, on my recent research trip to the United States I located some 100 unpublished letters in public archives and 1 still have three more to visit. The new U.S. material includes a charming series of letters at the Huntington Library to fellow admiral Sir Roger Curtis about the prospects of Curtis’s naval officer son, Lucius, over whom Nelson was watching tenderly while commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean in 1803-5; important letters at the William Clements Library relating to the Baltic campaign of April-June 1801 showing Nelson performing as skillfully as a diplomat as he had earlier as a fighting admiral; a revealing set of private letters at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis to the King of Naples and his prime minister, Sir John Acton, written during the Mediterranean campaign of 1803-5; and, in the Library of Congress, more than 25 letters and orders to Nelson’s protege George Cock- bum—the man who burned the White House in 1814.
What will happen to all this new material? First, it is important to emphasize that nothing that has been discovered so far will drastically alter our perception of Nelson. What does emerge is a more human picture to set against the two-dimensional “heroic” image that tends to be presented in biographies based on the older material. Future biographies will be able to incorporate more subtle touches of light and shade to the familiar story. For example, we will find out more about his complex web of professional relationships, his characteristically 18th-century use of patronage, and, perhaps most interesting of all, the extraordinary intelligence network he built during his last campaign in the Mediterranean in 1803-5.
Nelson was a great letter writer—arguably one of history’s greatest—and it would be regrettable if this superb new body of material were to be reduced simply to truncated extracts in biographies. For 2005, the two sponsoring museums have commissioned me to produce a new book of his letters, featuring some 400 of the most important of the newly discovered documents. After 2005, if the necessary funds can be raised, the intention is to publish a new edition of Nelson’s letters. This will draw together the contents of Nicolas’s great 1844-’46 opus, all the material that has been published in small batches since then, and all the newly discovered letters into one complete and definitive collection.
On 28 March 1805, Nelson wrote a long letter to Sir John Acton, now at the U.S. Naval Academy and hitherto unpublished. It ends, “May every good fortune attend you My Dear Sir John in all your undertakings, which are always of the Most Honorable kind, is the Constant Sincere Wish of Your Most attached and Sincere friend, Nelson & Bronte.” I like to think he would have approved of this latest “honourable undertaking” and would have wished it well in terms equally as warm and encouraging.
Regular updates on Year of the Sea and the Trafalgar Festival will be posted on the Web site of the National Maritime Museum at www.nmm.ack.uk/. For more information on The 1805 Club, visit the club’s Web site at www.admiralnelson.org/.