NELSON AND HIS CIRCLE

I

The tradition created by Drake and Hawkins was carried on by Nelson and Collingwood in a different age and under different conditions, and the same heroic spirit animated them all.  Nelson must certainly have been familiar with the enthralling tales of these men and of their gallant colleagues, but without all the essential qualities born in him he could not have been the victor of Trafalgar.  Men have to do something distinctive, that sets the human brain on fire, before they are really recognized as being great; then all others are put in the shade, no matter how necessary their great gifts may be to fill up the gaps in the man of initiative and of action.  Drake could not have done what he did had he not had the aid of Frobisher, and Jervis would not have become Earl St. Vincent had he not been supported by Nelson at the battle of that name; and we should never have seen the imposing monument erected in Trafalgar Square had Nelson been without his Collingwood.  Victorious and valiant performances do not come by chance, and so it comes to pass in the natural course of human law that if our Jervises, Nelsons, and Collingwoods, who are the prototypes of our present-day heroes, had not lived, we should not have had our Fishers, Jellicoes, and Beattys.

Nelson was always an attractive personality and by no means the type of man to allow himself to be forgotten.  He believed he was a personage with a mission on earth, and never an opportunity was given him that did not confirm this belief in himself.

Horatio Nelson was the son of the Rev. Edmund Nelson, and was born at Burnham Thorpe on the 29th September, 1758.  His mother died in 1767, and left eight children.  Her brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, was appointed to the Raisonable three years after her death, and agreed, at the request of Horatio himself and the instigation of his father, after some doubtful comments as to the boy’s physical suitableness for the rough life of a sailor, to take him; so on the 1st January, 1771, he became a midshipman on the Raisonable. On the 22nd May he either shipped of his own accord or was put as cabin-boy on a merchant vessel which went to the West Indies, and ended his career in the merchant service at the end of an eventful voyage.  In July 1772 he became midshipman on board the Triumph.  This was the real starting-point of his naval career and of the development of those great gifts that made him the renowned Admiral of the world.  Twenty-two years after joining his uncle’s ship he was made captain of the Agamemnon.  At the siege of Calvi in 1794 he was wounded in the right eye and lost the sight of it.  Three years afterwards he lost his right arm while commanding an attack on Santa Cruz, and although he had put so many sensational events into his life up to that time,