Inspiring ‘Energy & Activity’

On 19 January 1805, the Mediterranean Fleet, under the command of Vice Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, was taking on stores in Agincourt Sound, a fine deep-water anchorage at La Maddalena off the north coast of Sardinia. Suddenly two frigates appeared to the northwest flying the signal “Enemy at Sea.” The French fleet, which the British fleet had been watching constantly for more than two years, had finally left its base at Toulon. Instantly, the order was given to up anchor, and within a very short time the British vessels were under way, led by Nelson in the Victory.

As the great warships gathered speed, everyone in the British fleet was expecting a battle, not least Nelson himself. On 20 January, he wrote to his second in command, Rear Admiral Sir Richard Bickerton: “1 am a little anxious naturally, but no Man has more real cause to be happy. 1 hope to morrow we shall get hold of them, and the result I ought not to doubt.”¹ He also began detailed planning for the battle, telling the captain of one of the battleships, “I shall bring them most probably to action in the night as well as the day, therefore you may expect the Signal if we see them.” Five days later, however, with no news of the French, doubts began to set in. He sent one of his frigates, HMS Active, to look for the French at the Sardinian port of Cagliari, telling her captain to “return without one moment’s loss of time, for consider how anxious I must be for information of the Enemy and one moments delay may enable them to accomplish their object.”²

The same day he sent a message to another captain who was being detached to seek information: “You will believe my anxiety, I shall die if I do not meet them of a brain fever.”³ And when finally he heard that storms had driven the French back into Toulon, he wrote defensively to his friend the Duke of Clarence on 13 March, “I am sure Your Royal Highness will feel all the misery I have suffer’d from Janry: 19th: to this day when I know that the Enemy are in Port.”⁴ He thought his chance for a decisive victory had come and gone, but we now know that this sortie by the French was the opening gambit in a long campaign that would lead eventually to the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805.

This vivid picture of Nelson at work—handling his ships, searching for information, sharing his mounting anxiety with his colleagues and friends—will not be found in any of the standard biographies. That is because most of the documents on which it is based have only recently been located in the course of the Nelson Letters Project.⁵ Now in its sixth year, this remarkable research initiative by the National Maritime and Royal Naval museums has led to the discovery of some 1,400 unpublished Nelson letters in 35 archives all over the world, including a number in the United States. And as this wealth of new material has begun to find its way into the latest biographies and battle studies, our view of Nelson is beginning to change.

Throughout this summer, Britain has been enjoying a countrywide Trafalgar Festival. Starting with the spectacular International Fleet Review at Portsmouth on 28 June, there has been a staggering program of events, ranging from exhibitions and conferences to re-enactments and regattas, in which the battle and Nelson have been commemorated. Perhaps most imaginative of all is a scheme to plant 33 new “Trafalgar Woods,” each forest named after one of the British ships that took part in the battle.⁶

When the idea of the festival was first raised back in 1995, the general feeling was that there was nothing new to be said about Nelson. That judgment has been shot out of the water by the findings of the Nelson Letters Project, and, instead, a wide range of publications and events have been presenting Nelson’s story in a fresh and challenging manner.

Nelson’s leadership style is a key area of the familiar story on which new light is being shed. The new material enables us, as it were, to watch over Nelson’s shoulder at critical moments in his career in a sustained and detailed manner heretofore not possible. And when we do, the picture of Nelson the commander that emerges is both compelling and engaging. Suddenly, “The Nelson Touch,” as he referred to his Trafalgar battle plan in a letter to his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton, springs vividly to life. We can get a sense of what it was like to be present at one of Nelson’s briefings and to listen to him as he shared his thoughts and ideas in his characteristically boyish and enthusiastic manner.

Among the most fascinating of the new documents are Nelson’s Public Order Books, three of which have now been located. These were not formal records kept by secretaries but working books, used for the quick transmission of day-to-day matters.⁷ The contents were scribbled hurriedly, with many erasures and interlineations; there are no indexes, nor any numbering schemes. Minimal punctuation and frequent capitalization combine to give the orders an immediacy similar to present-day e-mails. With their urgent, almost breathless style, they conjure up a vivid sense of Nelson’s presence.

The orders would be copied into the book and often signed by Nelson—indeed, he occasionally would alter the wording of an order himself, thus demonstrating the close personal interest he took in the content of the book. Each of the ships in company would then send an officer to the flagship to make a copy and to sign the book to verify that they had done so. The copy would then be transferred into the daily order book of each ship’s captain. Other admirals used a similar system to convey routine orders, but Nelson characteristically also used the books to convey his own ethos and leadership style.

So, for example, in July 1801, he took command of a force of small vessels in the English Channel, hastily brought together to counter an invasion threat from a French army that was believed to be massing at Boulogne. On 29 July, Nelson arrived at Deal, the port closest to the great anchorage at the Downs that was to be his headquarters for the campaign, and exploded into action. Orders shot from his desk like rapid gunfire; each bristled with his trademark energy as he sought to impress his new subordinates with the urgency of the situation and the need for vigilance.

His style is vividly captured in a general order he issued on 31 July setting out the standards he expected from his captains. In it, he insisted that his ships were to be “always in readiness for weighing at the shortest possible notice and always prepared for Battle” and, moreover, “whenever the Enemy can be discovered they are to be closed with and attacked with all the Vigor which is possible.” He then went on to urge that everyone should act with “cordial unanimity” and “the greatest cheerfulness,” and finished with a characteristic assurance: “I rely with confidence on the Judgement and Support of every Individual under my Command.”⁸

It was a bravura performance—a classic demonstration of how to galvanize a new command and to impress one’s personality and style on subordinates right at the outset of a campaign or operation while winning their trust and support. His young aide de camp, Commander Edward Parker, was most impressed and told Emma Hamilton, “He made everyone pleased, filled them with emulation and set them all on the qui vive [alert].”⁹ That is an excellent summary of Nelson’s command methods.

Nelson used very similar methods in the autumn of 1805, when he took command of the British fleet off Cadiz just weeks before Trafalgar. As in 1801, the fleet had been hastily brought together—this time, to deal with the threat posed by the Combined Fleet of France and Spain that had taken refuge in the Spanish port following the defeat of Napoleon’s overambitious invasion plans by the brilliant maneuvers of the Royal Navy throughout the preceding summer. Nelson drew this disparate group of captains together by dining with them all within days of his arrival— “cordial unanimity” again. Captain Edward Codrington, who had never met with him before, wrote approvingly to his wife of “the superiority of Lord Nelson in all these social arrangements which bind his captains to their admiral.”¹⁰

After dinner, Nelson shared with them his battle plan— The Nelson Touch—and then backed up the verbal briefing with a written memorandum. The individual tactical elements of the plan were not particularly new—but sharing it in detail with his subordinates in this way was certainly different from the methods of most of his fellow admirals.

Indeed, we now have documentary evidence that Nelson had worked out the plan many weeks before. In 2001, during research for the Nelson Letters Project, a rough drawing was found on the back of some notes that he scribbled for a meeting in London in early September 1805 detailing the tactics that he intended to use.¹¹ Hailed as “the Holy Grail of naval history,” by historian Andrew Roberts, it has quickly become a key Battle of Trafalgar artifact and has been one of the centerpieces of the National Maritime Museum’s highly acclaimed bicentennial exhibition, Nelson & Napoleon.¹² This ability to plan meticulously well in advance of a battle was the bedrock of Nelson’s success as a leader. Vice Admiral Sir Cuthbert Collingwood, his long-standing friend and second in command at Trafalgar, commented that “everything seemed, as if by enchantment, to prosper under his direction,” hut then added, “it was the effect of system and nice combination, not of chance.”¹³

As well as socializing with his captains off Cadiz, Nelson also issued a string of orders, each couched in his trade mark urgent, emphatic language and designed to galvanize the whole fleet and quickly get it working in his way. Captain Sir Thomas Fremantle, an old comrade, wrote to his wife, “the energy and activity on board the Victory will make those who are slack keep a much better look out and preserve better discipline.”¹⁴ Thanks to all the new material, we can get a vivid sense of that “energy and activity” and thus appreciate more fully why Nelson was such a successful leader.

Another reason why he was so successful was that he dealt with his subordinates as individuals. This is best observed in the way he inspired the crew of HMS Victory as she sailed into action at Trafalgar. A number of the British ships’ captains summoned their men to the quarterdeck and, standing above them, gave rousing speeches to the assembled companies. But such distant formality was not Nelson’s way. Instead, he went to meet his men himself, touring the flagship’s decks and stopping to chat with each gun’s crew as they waited at their action stations. In this way, he was able to talk to them in small groups, and they were able to see him up close and to chat with him. Able Seaman John Brown remembered his words: “Lads, this will be a glorious day for those of us who live to see it. I shall not be satisfied with twelve ships as I took at the Nile.”¹⁵

So, as the bicentennial year draws to its close, our appreciation of Nelson’s leadership qualities has been greatly enhanced—and not just as a great fighting admiral but also as a superb manager of men. His great contemporaries Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington may have been his equals in tactical skill, but neither could match him as a leader of men. Wellington’s disdainful, aristocratic contempt for those he called “the scum of the earth” who won his victories for him is well known; it is quite impossible to imagine Nelson ever saying anything so disparaging. As for Napoleon, he may have been loved by his men, as Nelson was, but he seldom identified with them as individuals, as Nelson habitually did. When Napoleon inspected his troops, an aide had to accompany him to identify soldiers who had previously served with him so that he could pretend to recognize them. Nelson was able to do this unaided. Indeed, he could even spot former comrades in a large crowd and call them forward to be recognized.

Jane Austen’s brother Francis had an opportunity to observe the Nelsonian magic at close quarters when he served with the admiral as a battleship captain for more than a year in 1803-5 in the Mediterranean and again off Cadiz in the weeks before Trafalgar. Shortly after the battle, he wrote a wonderful appreciation of his admiral that deserves to be better known:

I never heard of his equal, nor do I expect again to see such a man. To the soundest judgement he united prompt decision and speedy execution of his plans; and he possessed to a superior degree the happy talent of making every class of persons pleased with their situation and eager to exert themselves in forwarding the public service.¹⁶

That style of leadership is timeless—which is why Nelson can still be such an inspiration 200 years after his death.