JACKET BLURB

Nelson's immortal victories were won in the seas around Europe but as Tom Pocock shows in this brilliant and original book it was the America and West Indies station that formed him as a sea officer and a fighting commander.

These adventurous years, so crucial to his development, have never before been studied in depth. Even before he became a midshipman he had sailed those seas in a merchant ship and both as midshipman and lieutenant the great part of his time was spent there. It was there that he met his closest friend and future companion in arms, Cuthbert Collingwood, there that he was shipmates with the Duke of Clarence, the future William IV, there that he met and married his wife. There, too, he formed another close friendship which, many years later, was suddenly to involve him with revolutionaries and traitors, one of whom he was still to regard as a friend.

But the most exciting and dramatic passage of his American service has hitherto been strangely neglected — the ill-fated Nicaragua campaign. This was a daring scheme concocted by the Governor of Jamaica during the War of American Independence for cutting the Spanish American Empire in two and anticipating the Panama Canal by securing direct access to the Pacific. The San Juan river flowed from Lake Nicaragua, a great inland sea whose farther shore was a mere ten miles from the Pacific, out into the Caribbean. There were a few settlers at its mouth and a fort near its head. A small expeditionary force should suffice to seize it, after which naval supremacy could easily be achieved on the lake.

Such, at any rate, was the tempting prospect. Nelson, lately promoted captain of a frigate, volunteered to lead the naval party that was to support the soldiers. He was not in command of the expedition, but the colonel, who was, rapidly and generously acknowledged the genius for fighting leadership that first revealed itself amid the chaos and disasters of the San Juan expedition.

The amateurishness and incompetence with which it had been mounted is only less astonishing than the narrow margin by which it failed. No attempt had been made to assess the fearful geographical and medical hazards which were finally to account for nine out of every ten men who set out. There was next to no local intelligence and alarmingly little discipline. Yet, incredibly, Fort San Juan was captured. And had not Nelson in the moment of victory been carried down the river in what was thought to be a dying condition the whole wild gamble might have come off.

Tom Pocock is a leading authority on Nelson. The entry in the current edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is from his pen and his short life of Nelson has been kept in print since it was first published twelve years ago. He has enhanced his stature by uncovering a great deal of new material about this fascinating episode. He also knows the Caribbean well and has even followed the track of the expedition up the river San Juan. The result is a book that evokes an exciting period and an exotic background and, best of all, presents a fresh view of the greatest of our national heroes.

Tom Pocock has had lifelong connections with the Royal Navy and with Nelson's 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, near Nelson's birthplace at Burnham Thorpe, where he has spent much time.
A Fleet Street journalist for more than thirty years — he is now Travel Editor of the Evening Standard — Tom Pocock is the author of six books, including biographies of Nelson and his brilliant protégé Captain William Hoste, and of two sharply contrasting figures : Walter Greaves, the artist of Victorian Chelsea, and General Sir Walter Walker, the controversial soldier. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Chelsea.