Lord Nelson: A Selected Bibliography
By Tom Pocock
In 15 years, the bicentennary of Lord Nelson’s death in action off Cape Trafalgar will be celebrated, or, rather, mourned because his memory remains so vividly alive. Rarely does a year pass without the publication in London and New York of a new biography or study of his relationships and campaigns. The present total of books about the English admiral stands somewhere around 200. Both readers and writers must ask whether there is anything more to say about him.
As one of his biographers myself, I have often wondered. It must have been a quarter of a century ago that the late Oliver Warner, that most knowledgeable, readable, and generous of the biographers, told me that he thought there was not. There might, he thought, be a few monographs to be researched and written—Nelson and prize money, for example—but any biography would be reworking a well-plowed field.
In that he was wrong and I feel sure that he would be the first to admit it. In my own research, new vistas have suddenly opened up. There was, for example, the disastrous campaign in Nicaragua when Nelson accompanied the expedition up the Rio San Juan in 1780 in an attempt to cut the Americas in two and annex the Spanish empire. Earlier historians had tended to give the same brief outline of the event and I, too, doubted whether there was more to be said until wonderfully vivid accounts of it emerged in the Public Record Office from Colonial Office rather than Admiralty files.
Other aspects of his life became apparent and suggested further exploration. Amongst them was his relationship with Mary Moutray, the attractive and sophisticated young wife of an older retired officer in the West Indies, and Nelson’s sudden enthusiasm for a political career when living with the Hamiltons at Merton in 1801. There are other enticing avenues, such as a new assessment of Nelson’s part in the recapture of Naples and the suppression of the Parthenopean revolt in 1799.
But why bother? What is it about this particular admiral that grips the imagination on both sides of the Atlantic so powerfully? It is not only his genius as a commander—both in battle and in command of men—but his extraordinary character, which reflects flashes of light and insight from so many different angles, like a cut diamond. Now, as then, he is somebody with whom almost everybody can identify: both Everyman and Superman.
Happily, he wrote good letters in immense numbers and, because he was a celebrity in his own lifetime, these tended to be kept. Even now, unpublished letters of his constantly appear in the salerooms of London and New York. But the principal sources for his biographers must be those already printed, which began to appear while he was still writing those letters.
So the first of the printed sources of understanding his life and times must be The Naval Chronicle. I have on the wall of my study Nelson’s own order to the news agent in the village of Merton, dated 7 January 1802. He is ordering the delivery first of The Naval Chronicle and then The European Magazine and The Critical Review. The former began publication in 1799 and continued for 20 years to give naval officers news and entertainment, mostly naval anecdotes and some verse glorifying their achievements. It was Nelson’s favorite reading; he could read much about himself, and so can we.
Today, of course, The Naval Chronicle, as with all the earlier works about Nelson, can only be found in a few libraries and in antiquarian bookshops. Indeed, probably less than half a dozen are in print at any one time. Yet they all are available somewhere and whether they are rare, expensive—they are probably both—it is worth knowing which are the most valuable to students of his life.
The death of Nelson in 1805 brought about an extraordinary outburst of grief expressed in obituaries, paintings, verse, statuary, the naming of towns and mountains after him, and the mass-productions of memorabilia and books. Many of the latter—and those that followed for several decades—drew upon the memories of those who had known him.
The immediate rush into print after Trafalgar was led by F. W. Blagdon. whose short biography—the story, already familiar from newspaper accounts, expanded to 72 pages—was soon forgotten. In the same year, 1806, came those by James Harrison, who had been helped by Lady Hamilton, and John Chamoct who had had access to Nelson’s correspondence with his early mentor, Captain Locker. In 1807, an important firsthand account was published: The Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson by the surgeon Sir William Beatty.
The authorized biography and the first of many full-length, rounded works followed in 1809. This was The Life aid Services of Horatio Viscount Nelson which drew on the recollections of his family; indeed, the man himself had cooperated with the authors—the Revered James Stanier Clarke and John M’Arthur—by writing an autobiographical sketch for them six years before his death.
The most highly regarded of the earl), biographies, Robert Southey’s The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson (London: G. and Dably, 1868) was published in island has usually been in print ever since As the middle years of the 19th century approached, the ranks of those who themselves remembered Nelson began to thin. In 1843, Margaret and Alfred Garry wrote a memoir of the former’s father, the Reverend Alexander Scott, Nelson’s friend and chaplain. Next year, one of Nelson's former midshipmen, George Parsons, published his entertaining and revealing memoirs, Nelsonian Reminiscences (Little & Brown, 1843), which marked the end of personal accounts.
But just as those ended, a new, rich source was provided by the publication of the first of seven volumes of The Dispatches and Letters of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, edited by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1844. As it emerged over three years, this great work was seen to be the bedrock of research for all future biographers and, 50 years later, it was to be joined by another massive collection: the Nelson and Hamilton papers collected by Alfred Morrison and printed in two volumes. The former collection was to be condensed into an anthology. The Letters and Despatches of Horatio Viscount Nelson, by Sir John Knox Laughton in 1886.
That these published collections were by no means comprehensive, invaluable us they were, was demonstrated in 1849 when Thomas Pettigrew claimed that he bud quoted from some 600 hitherto unpublished letters in his Memoirs of the We of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson (London: T. and W. Bone, 1849). But it was to be nearly a century after Trafalgar before Nelson finally found a biographer of his own stamp—the great American historian Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had already made bis name with his magisterial work. The influence of Sea Power upon History (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988). His biography. The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), First published in 1897, saw Nelson in the context of history, as its title suggests.
Mahan’s work seemed to meet the demand for biographies as the centenary of Trafalgar approached and increasingly authors turned to the detail of Nelson’s life. In 1899, Hilda Gamlin’s chatty but quite original Nelson's Friendships (London: Hutchinson & Co.) was followed by the fascinating and highly original Naples 1799, a study of Nelson’s involvement there in support of the Bourbons by Convince Giglioli. In that year, 1903, the same theme, based on contemporary docents, was addressed by H. C. Gutteridge in his Nelson and the Neapolitan Robins, published by the Navy Records Society in London.
The centenary, two years later, was marked by the publication of two more books, which gave splendid background details to the portrait of Nelson, which was then fixed in the public mind. One was Sea Life in Nelson’s Time (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1971) by John Masefield, the future poet laureate, who had himself been a seaman. The other was Walter Sichel’s full and well- researched biography of Nelson’s mistress, Emma, Lady Hamilton. These were followed by two studies of Nelson at home with his family and friends in England: M. Eyre Matcham’s The Nelsons of Burnham Thorpe (1911) and Nelson in England by E. Hallam Moorhouse (New York: Dutton, 1913).
New interest in what had actually happened at Trafalgar now grew. In 1910 The Campaign of Trafalgar (AMS Press, 1976), by Sir Julian Corbett, was published and followed three years later by an official document, which demonstrated that, the event was not buried so deep in history: The Report of a Committee Appointed by the Admiralty to Examine and Consider the Evidence Relating to the Tactics Employed by Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar.
This was followed, in 1917, by the most human and poignant aspect of the battle with the publication of Nelson’s Last Diary, edited by Gilbert Hudson. The output of biographies continued, but few could add more than their authors’ opinions. They included Sir Geoffrey Callender’s rather romantic The Life of Lord Nelson (New York: Longmans, Green and Co.) in 1912, and Nelson (London: John Lane the Bodley Head) by C. S. Forester, which was published in 1929 and had the distinction of being by the author of the popular “Hornblower” novels.
It was the detail of Nelson’s life that now became the field for exploration. In this, the way was often led by contributors to The Mariner's Mirror, the journal of the Society for Nautical Research. Articles illuminating such partly neglected scenes included Horatio Nelson and the Murderous Cooper, a study of his support for one of his men, accused of murder in 1787, by H. L. Cryer(Vol. 60, No. 1), Nelson at Santa Cruz by J. D. Spinney (Vol. 45, No. 3) and Lord Nelson's Journey Through Germany, an account of his Continental tour with the Hamiltons in 1800 (Vol. 21, No. 2).
After the end of the World War II, the publication of two important books opened a new era in Nelson studies. The first was Carola Oman’s great biography. Nelson (London: The Reprint Society, 1947), the most vividly written and detailed account of his life to date when it appeared. The author set new standards not only in literary merit but in research into marginal but relevant lives, events, and background. This was followed four years later by Nelson’s Letters to His Wife and Other Documents (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), a large collection of hitherto unpublished letters edited by George P. B. Naish, which suggested that the discovery of such material would point a way forward for biographers.
In 1958, Oliver Warner, who had made a lifelong study of Nelson, produced his own masterly biography, A Portrait of Lord Nelson (London: Chatto and Windus). A more masculine, spare book than Carola Oman’s, it firmly grasped the essentials of Nelson’s life and character in a direct and convincing manner.
Meanwhile, the detail continued to be illuminated and magnified. Oliver Warner wrote The Battle of the Nile (London: Batsford, 1960) and Dudley Pope produced the definitive account of the Battle of Copenhagen in The Great Gamble (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972). I myself was able to give the first full account of the Nicaragua campaign in The Young Nelson in the Americas (London: Collins, 1980). His last battle continued to fascinate and one of the best accounts of it was David Howarth’s Trafalgar (Collins, 1969).
Nelson’s private life received the attention it always had. Only one biography of poor Fanny Nelson has been published—Nelson’s Wife (London: Cassell, 1939), by Edith M. Keate—but his mistress, Emma Hamilton, continued to be a popular subject. The most detailed of several biographies remains Flora Fraser’s Beloved Emma (New York: Knopf, 1987), while her husband was accorded a scholarly and readable biography by Brian Fothergill, Sir William Hamilton (London: Faber, 1969). Nelson’s daughter by Emma was accorded her own admirable biography in 1970: Horatia Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press), by Winifred Germ.
Portraits of his contemporaries in the Royal Navy often threw light on Nelson from a fresh angle and amongst these were Ludovic Kennedy’s Nelson’s Band of Brothers (London: Odham Press, 1951), Nelson’s Dear Lord: A Portrait of St. Vincent (London: Macmillan, 1962) by Evenly Berchman, and my own Remember Nelson: The Life of Captain Sir William Hoste (Collins, 1977).
In the last few years, two new biographies have been published: my own Horatio Nelson (New York: Knopf, 1988), which included much fresh detail; and Nelson: The Immortal Memory (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989), in which David and Stephen Howarth told the story with authority and insight. Nelson’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1793-1815 (Naval Institute Press, 1989), by Brian Lavery, was published recently.
In 1955, two short bibliographies of the Nelson literature were published. One was an article in The Mariner’s Mirror by K. F. Lindsay-MacDougall; the other was Oliver Warner’s Lord Nelson: A Guide to Reading (London: Caravel Press). At the time of writing, another is in preparation: Lord Nelson (London: Meckler), by Leonard Cowie. And rumors current amongst those who frequent the principal sources of original material—the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, London, the British Museum, the Monmouth Museum, and the Public Record Office—suggest that at least two more biographies are on the way.
Ghost Ship: The Confederate Raider Alabama
Norman C. Delaney. Middletown, CT: Southfarm Press, 1989. 90 pp. Photos. Illus. Bib. Ind. $9.95. paper.
Damn the Torpedoes: Naval Incidents of the Civil War
A. A. Hoehling. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1989. 207 pp. Photos. Illus. Bib. Ind. $19.95 ($17.95).
Reviewed by Major Richard A. Stewart, U.S. Marine Corps
The U.S. Civil War, like the Korean War, has recently enjoyed a revived popular interest. Fortunately, this renaissance includes a renewed focus on the naval aspects of the war between the states. Two short but interesting books have recently appeared on this subject.
Norman C. Delaney’s Ghost Ship provides a brief but comprehensive chronological account of the Confederacy’s most successful commerce raider, the CSS Alabama. From her commissioning in August 1862 to her sinking in a climactic duel with the USS Kearsarge in June 1864, the Confederate warship captured and destroyed more Union vessels than any other southern raider, a distinction that made her the Union’s most sought-after quarry.
Her skipper. Commander Raphael Semmes, contributed much to the legend of the “Ghost Ship,” as the Alabama became known for her ability to strike and disappear without a trace. An experienced former U.S. naval officer, Semmes dedicated himself to the rebel cause following secession. He mainly kept to himself, dealing with his crew primarily through his first lieutenant, John Kell.
In fact, as Semmes’s second-in- command, or “Luff,” Kell figures prominently in Delaney’s account of the Alabama, largely because the book is based on a previously published biography of Kell by the author. Kell was highly skilled at gunnery and seamanship and was a stem disciplinarian, ready to throw a man into irons at the slightest offense. His abilities ideally complemented those of his more aloof captain.
The Alabama ranged widely in her voyages, even to Singapore. During his two years as captain of the Alabama, Semmes seized more than 300 vessels and sank 55 Union ships. The raider seldom sought port, for her crew could subsist for long stretches off their seizures. There were no port calls in the South because of the Union blockade. As the long voyage continued, the crew’s morale began to ebb. When compelled to engage the Kearsarge off Cherbourg, France, on 19 June 1864, the men’s spirit alone proved insufficient. That morning, Semmes sallied forth from the French port to meet the Kearsarge in battle. In the running duel that followed, both sides exchanged voluminous fire, but federal gunnery proved superior. Semmes avoided capture himself by fleeing to the English yacht Deerhound, and eventually returned to the Confederacy a hero, with promotion to commodore and command of the ill-fated James River squadron.
Ghost Ship is both readable and full of fascinating details on exploits of the Alabama and daily life on board the raider. The account is fairly thorough, though not exhaustive. The author, a professor of history at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, and adjunct professor at the Naval War College, attempts the difficult and risky task of combining a scholarly approach with a dramatic style- Although he falls somewhat short on both accounts, his effort nevertheless adds an important dimension to understanding the naval conflict during the Civil War.
By comparison, A. A. Hoehling’s Damn the Torpedoes is a short compendium of various important naval incidents of the Civil War. Unlike Delaney, Hoehling focuses primarily on providing entertaining vignettes, with little effort at scholarly analysis. He tells the various stories individually and only links them chronologically.
The accounts focus on the better- known incidents of the war, such as the famous first encounter of the ironclads- Merrimack and Monitor. This story is particularly interesting in the way it reveals the near panic along the North’s eastern seaboard after the seemingly impervious rebel ironclad effectively attacked the Union’s wooden warshipsblockading Hampton Roads. In Washington, fears were widespread that the Merrimack would steam up the Potomac and shell the capital.
Often the stories are humorous, such as that of Captain Newcomb, the unfortunate skipper of the Union paddlewheeler Idaho, who found himself unable to onload a cargo of venereal-disease-ridden Nashville prostitutes.
The book contains other, more family episodes, including a dramatic and detailed version of the Alabama's engagement with the Kearsarge, which includes some details lacking from Delaney’s account. Hoehling concludes by telling about the greatest loss of life of the war resulting from a naval disaster. It actually occurred three weeks after the war’s end. The Union sidewheel steamer Sultana mysteriously exploded on the Mississippi near Memphis. The Sultana was grossly overcrowded, filled with returning Union soldiers, including survivors of Southern prison camps. Confederate prisoners, and civilians. Of the 2,300 passengers and crew on board, more than 1,600 perished in the flaming, sinking wreckage. The loss of life exceeded that of the Titanic and the Lusitania.
Hoehling clearly intends his book to be more entertaining than insightful. His prose is quick and colorful, and captures the era in the mind of reader. Unfortunately, his accounts are sometimes disorganized and difficult to follow. Certainly, Damn the Torpedoes is not intended as a definitive account of the naval portion of the Civil War. But what Hoehling provides is a more personal perspective and a wealth of minute details normally lacking in a more comprehensive work.
The Coldest War
James Brady. New York: Crown Publishers (Orion Books), 1990. 256 pp. Photos. Maps. $19.95. ($17.95).
Reviewed by Ensign Jack Satterfield, U.S. Naval Reserve
Although they still watch M*A*S*H” reruns, most Americans know little about, or have forgotten, the Korean War era, so its 40th anniversary this year is passing unnoticed. The Coldest War, by well-known journalist James Brady, may help reverse this oversight. Unlike recent formal histories of the Korean conflict, such as Clay Blair’s The Forgotten War (Times Books, 1988), or academic studies on men’s behavior in Battle, such as John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (Penguin, 1983), Brady’s book is a personal memoir aimed at a popular audience. It’s hardly the first, but is one the few by a professional writer. Brady, who served as a rifle platoon leader and battalion intelligence officer, Reuses on his own experiences in small segments of the battle line and relates them matter-of-factly. His writing is descriptive, clipped, and brisk—perfect for the subject—and reads like an afteraction summary. Although Brady exercises considerable dramatic control throughout his book, he deliberately understates his skill as a writer and assumes the role of an “average” observer with whom any reader can identify strongly. This increases the book’s effect as an honest report on real and terrible events.
Combat veterans will probably appreciate The Coldest War because Brady pulls no punches and openly discusses every grimy aspect of the fighting he shared with others, from battlefield latrine etiquette to severed limbs. But the book’s greater value lies in its unvarnished, truthful account of warfare at the individual level for those who have not shared the experience. Some of the milder examples: Brady describes the enemy as “gooks” and “chinks,” just as they were known in 1951; and tells how his utilities, worn for 46 days on the line without a change or a bath, were so fouled by dirt and excrement that they were burned in a rear-echelon camp during a break in the fighting. Only the names of some Marines have been changed in deference to their privacy.
Brady’s narrative is remarkably precise. Obviously, the war made a deep impression on him, but he could also rely on a couple of notebooks he kept while in action, letters written to a girlfriend who returned them to him later, and the manuscript of a novel, written years ago but never published, based on his experience. The result is unusually complete and compelling.
Brady had no interest in a military career. Like other college students seeking draft deferments in the late 1940s, this street-wise New York native signed up for the Marine Corps’s Platoon Leaders Class and a reserve commission. The war started right after he graduated, and he was called up.
When Brady arrived in Korea by Thanksgiving, 1951, the war had stabilized, with opposing armies entrenched more or less along the 38th parallel. Veterans of World War I would have understood this mode of fighting. Assigned to a battalion in the First Marine Division, he first saw action in a company under a captain named John Chafee, now a U.S. senator from Rhode Island. Under Chafee’s tutelage, Brady learned to fight, survive, and lead. He had to learn the lessons quickly, since errors left students hurt or dead.
This compression of experience is one of the book’s overarching themes. The few weeks Brady actually commanded a platoon seem, in the story, like months. His days on the battle line were so exhausting, disorienting, stressful, and plain scary that it must have seemed impossible to him and others that those events could occur in such a short span of time.
Although the battalion endured Korea’s unspeakable winter cold and heavy snows in underground bunkers, its members still had plenty of opportunities to fight and die. Both sides constantly patrolled and probed each other’s lines to throw their enemies off balance. Frequent, accurate artillery barrages killed or wounded many Marines. Minefields were another deadly hazard, and a particular concern for Brady, who set one off while on a winter patrol and miraculously escaped injury.
Sent home after just nine months, Brady participated in plenty enough action to last him a lifetime. He was never decorated for heroism, receiving only theater ribbons and three battle stars, but he performed well in a point-blank assault on a Korean position and in other exchanges. He saw men on both sides die and witnessed individual courage, cowardice, and conduct that both honored and disgraced the Marine Corps.
In a recent telephone conversation, he noted that his experience was probably average for a Marine in Korea, since he saw a good deal of action, but never had a chance to influence events except for those immediately around him, or to be unusually heroic. He was as brave as the next man, and as frightened. After successfully dodging exploding grenades during a charge against a Korean position, for instance, he was nearly incapacitated by an attack of nerves while returning to his own lines. Indeed, said Brady, while good training and the Marines’ innate sense of military superiority helped, he believes the capacity for heroics in battle is mostly a function of youthful confidence and naivete.
Brady’s admiration and regard for the Marine Corps is still strong. He takes such recent incidents as the Beirut hotel bombing personally because he still feels kinship with Marines serving today. As for the war, he believes that U.S. involvement was appropriate and correct. “The Russians and their client states at
the time were really pushing us, and we had to show them we couldn’t be pushed,” he said. “It was worth it.” Brady’s book is also worth the effort, for his fellow Korean veterans, for other military readers, and especially for a public that has only a remote acquaintance with our “forgotten war.”
Other Titles of Interest
Captives of Shanghai: The Story of the President Harrison
David H. and Gretchen G. Grover. Napa, CA: Western Maritime Press, 1989. 202 pp. Photos. Notes. Bib. Ind. $11.95.
Different Waterfronts: Stories from the Wooden Boat Revival
Peter H. Spectre. Gardiner, ME: Harpswell Press, 1989. 242 pp. illus. $22.95.
The Ends of Greatness—Haig, Petain, Rathenau, and Eden: Victims of History
Gene Smith. New York: Crown Publishers, 1990. 256 pp. Bib. $18.95 ($17.05).
Escort Carriers of World War Two
Kenneth Poolman. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 1989. 50 pp. Photos. Tables. $7.95 ($7.15).
John Paul Jones and the Battle off Flamborough Head: A Reconsideration
Thomas J. Schaeper. New York: Peter Lang. 1989. 125 pp. Notes. Bib. Ind. $7.95 ($7.15).
Masters of the Art: A Marine’s Memoir of Parris Island and Vietnam
Ronald Winter. New York: Carleton Press, 1989. 239 pp. $14.50.
Memoirs
Andrei Gromyko. New York: Doubleday. 1989. 414 pp. Photos. Append. Ind. $24.95 ($22.45).
Naval Accidents 1945-1988
William M. Arkin and Joshua Handler, Washington, DC: Greenpeace, 1989. 83 pp. Tables. Figs. Append. Order directly, Greenpeace USA, Attn: C. Zimmer, 1436 U St., NW, Washington, DC 20009. Requested: $10 contribution.
Shield of Republic/Sword of Empire: A Bibliography of United States Military Affairs, 1783-1846
John C. Fredriksen, compiler. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990. Ind. $65.00
Tanks, Fighters & Ships: U.S. Conventional Force Planning Since WWII
Maurice A. Mallin. Washington, DC: Brasseys, 1990. 273 pp. Append. Ind. $27.00 ($24.30).
Women Warlords
Tim Newark. New York: Sterling Publisher Co., 1990. 144 pp. Photos. Illus. Bib. Ind. $24.95 ($22.45).