JACKET BLURB

`I say he will be a second Nelson'. Emma Hamilton's words reflect — can we doubt it? — the enthusiasm of her famous lover. Nelson seems to have made it clear to the brilliant young officer whose career he had fostered from the day that he took him to sea that he thought of him as his professional heir.

Even, on a personal level, as the son that neither wife nor mistress had been able to give him.
William Hoste returned these feelings with all the warmth of a generous nature. Like Nelson he was the son of a Norfolk parson but where Nelson's father was a man of principle and cultivation, Dixon Hoste was a spendthrift scapegrace who had taken holy orders simply because he had exhausted every other means of keeping hunters and living in the style appropriate to a country gentleman. Thackeray might have had him in mind as a model for the Rev. Bute Crawley in Vanity Fair.

From the partridge shooting and fox hunting of Norfolk the twelve-year-old boy was plunged into the dark, smelly, orlop deck of a man-of-war. The discomforts and squalor of life at sea were nothing to the excitement of serving with Nelson in those incomparable years in the Mediterranean. Nelson, inevitably, dominates the early part of the book as he dominated Hoste's career. But from the time that Hoste achieved his own command he moves confidently to the centre of the stage. No generation of naval officers have had such continuous opportunities of action and of prize money. Hoste made the most of them. But his father, who had earlier bilked Nelson of the allowance advanced to his son, squandered nearly all he won. How generous and attractive a man William was may be gauged from the fact that he appears to have felt no resentment, treating his father with undiminished affection and kindness to the end of his life.

The climax of his professional career came in 1811 when, at the Battle of Lissa in the Adriatic, he won a brilliant victory over the French and their Venetian allies. This was followed by daring and spectacular attacks on the two great fortress-cities that are now Dubrovnik and Kotor in Yugoslavia, where his feats inspired some of the adventures that C. S. Forester attributed to Captain Hornblower.

Tom Pocock has drawn upon a mass of Hoste's hitherto unpublished letters and papers that have only recently come to light. He brings to vivid life a naval commander who, if he did not fulfil Emma's prophecies, was a superb and early example of the new type of naval officer to whom Nelson was th inspiration and the pattern. The story of his adventures sweeps through the turbulent and glorious years of the Napoleonic wars. It is admirably counterpointed by glimpses of Jane Austen's England under the broad Norfolk skies.

Tom Pocock has had lifelong connections with the Royal Navy and with Norfolk. His father taught history and English at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, for many years and he himself has seen much of the Navy as a war correspondent and as a former Naval Correspondent of The Times and Defence Correspondent of the Evening Standard. His mother's family lived in Norfolk, where his grandfather was Archdeacon of Lynn and Bishop of Thetford.

He and his wife and two daughters have a house in the county, near Nelson's village of Burnham Thorpe. A Fleet Street journalist for more than thirty years — he is now Travel Editor of the Evening Standard — Tom Pocock is the author of five books, including biographies of Nelson, the Chelsea artist Walter Greaves and the brilliant and controversial soldier, General Sir Walter Walker.