Never Lose an Hour Or Waste a Wind

By Dan Hagen

Thanks to the treasure-trove resources of EIU’s Booth Library, I’m trying something new — reading two biographies at once. I switch back and forth between them to compare accounts of major events, sort of a way of triangulating the subject.

Horatio Nelson portrait by Friedrich Heinrich Fuger

I have C.S. Forester’s 1929 biography “Lord Nelson,” which emphasizes the naval battles, and Terry Coleman’s 2002 biography “The Nelson Touch,” which offers a fuller account of the personal dimension of Horatio Nelson’s life and era.

Forester’s book is full of phrases that sound like “tacking to leeward,” which is probably something you can’t even do, but who cares? They sound cool, and I’m never going to have to maneuver a sailing ship manned mostly by “pressed labor” slaves into raking a bunch of French guys with cannon fire. Just as well. My sympathies lie largely with the French revolutionaries, not with the worshippers of “royalty.”

But not everything is unfamiliar in Nelson’s world. For example, Coleman’s book includes the early equivalent of an editorial cartoon by Isaac Cruikshank. The married Nelson is pictured smoking with his also-married mistress, Lady Hamilton, who remarks, “Pho, the old man’s pipe is always out, but yours burns with full vigour.” Nelson, puffing on an extremely long and suggestive-looking pipe, replies, “Yes yes. I’ll give you such a smoke. I’ll pour a whole broadside into you.” That was published 200 years ago, proving that vulgar celebrity gossip has a truly venerable pedigree. Nelson was unflinchingly heroic, naturally generous and vainly self-deceiving, even silly at times. His silliness got him killed when he insisted on wearing a glinting chest full of decorations that served as a perfect sharpshooter’s target during the Battle of Trafalgar. But then Nelson was an implacable monarchist, and foolishness is an inevitable byproduct of fascination with the insufferable weirdness that is “royal rank.”  Aristocracy has been a sharp pain in the world’s ass for centuries, and is always trying to reassert its virulent hold, whether through titles or billions, even in nominally democratic republics.

Re: “Lord Nelson” by C.S. Forester (1929) and “The Nelson Touch” by Terry Coleman (2002).