The Tiller

by Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

He came aboard the Victory in Agincourt Sound on a morning of hard north-westerly wind, in January of the year five, with a letter in an oilskin and a face that had been scrubbed for the occasion until it shone. Fifteen years old, perhaps. A midshipman's patch on a coat that had been made for a bigger boy and taken in at the seams by somebody with more goodwill than skill. Hardy brought him to the cabin himself, which told me Hardy had already spoken to him and thought I should.

"Mr Lark, my lord. Of the Corinna. With Captain Moberly's letter."

I had Captain Moberly's letter already. It had come in by a sloop from the inshore squadron two days before, and I had read it twice, because it was the kind of letter I like to read twice: a boat action on the coast of Provence, a French tartane cut out from under a battery, laden with oil and soap and wine for Toulon, one officer killed, three men wounded, the prize brought off. And a paragraph at the end, warmly done, recommending Mr Arthur Lark, midshipman, who upon the fall of Lieutenant Dace had taken command of the boat and carried the vessel with great coolness and resolution.

So I knew why he had come, or thought I did. A captain sends a boy to his admiral with a letter like that so that the admiral may look at him and remember the face. I do not object to it. I was once sent in the same way, with less to show for it, and I remember the admiral's face better than he can ever have remembered mine.

"Sit down, Mr Lark," I said. "Hardy, a glass of wine for Mr Lark. You have been in a boat all morning and you are as wet as a herring."

He did not sit. He stood with his hat under his arm and looked at the place where my right sleeve is pinned across my coat, the way they all do, and then made himself look at my face instead, the way the well-brought-up ones do. Then he said, "My lord, the letter is wrong."

---

I will set down what he told me as near as I can to the way he told it, because the way he told it was half the matter.

The Corinna had been lying off the coast east of Toulon for a week, looking into the little bays where the coasting trade creeps along from Marseille under the guns of the batteries. Captain Moberly had seen the tartane go into one of these bays at dusk on the third day, and on the evening of the fifth, when the moon was late and the sky had thickened over, he sent the cutter in after her. Ten oars. Mr Dace, the second lieutenant, in the stern-sheets. Mr Lark beside him. Job Cattermole, the coxswain, at the tiller.

Now here was the first thing I liked, and I stopped the boy to make sure of it. Before the boat left the ship, Mr Dace had the whole crew aft by the gangway, all twelve of them, and he told them the business. Not the officers only. Every man. The bay, the point with the battery on it, the tartane lying in close under the battery with a cable out to the north, and the land wind that would come off the hills after midnight and carry her out if she was cut loose. How many men they expected aboard her. Where he would board and where Cattermole would board. And then — the boy gave it me in the lieutenant's very words, and I had him say it twice — "If we are parted, or if I am knocked on the head, you go alongside her. That is the whole of it. You go alongside her and you take her."

I asked Mr Lark whether the men had said anything. He said one of them, a Deal man called Rennie, had asked whether there would be grog after, and Mr Dace had said there would be double, and that was all the questions.

They pulled in with the oars muffled, the thole-pins wrapped in spun-yarn and the looms greased where they bore on the gunwale, and they went slow, because a boat that hurries makes a noise. A little after two in the morning the rain began. Not a squall. One of those fine, steady Mediterranean rains that comes out of nothing and does not stop, that soaks a man through his jacket in ten minutes and puts out every light on the sea.

"We could not see the ship any more, my lord," the boy said. "Captain Moberly was to show two lights at the mizzen peak if he wanted us back. We looked for them. You could not see your own hand."

They came round the point. The battery was a black shape above them, and they were so close under it that the boy said he could smell the woodsmoke from the guardhouse, and something cooking — onions, he thought. Then a sentry on the wall heard the oars, or the water off the blades, or nothing at all, and fired his musket down into the dark. One shot. It struck Mr Dace in the neck.

The boy told me this part very plainly. He did not dress it up and I did not ask him to. Mr Dace fell against him, and then down between the thwarts, and the boy got his hand on the wound, and the lieutenant tried to say something and could not, and in about the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer he was dead. Cattermole had them lie on their oars while it happened. Up on the wall they heard the sentry calling to somebody, and a door bang, and men's voices, and then nothing more, because the rain was so loud on the stones and on the water that nobody on the wall could hear anything either.

"And then, my lord," said Mr Lark, "I gave the order to go back to the ship."

---

I asked him what the order was. Exactly.

He said: "I said, Give way, Cattermole, we are going back to the ship."

I asked him what Cattermole did.

The boy said Cattermole said, "Aye aye, sir," the way a coxswain says it, at once and without any argument in it. And then he did not put the tiller over. He held the boat where she was, the men still lying on their oars, and the rain coming down, and Mr Dace in the bottom of the boat with his face turned up in the wet. And Cattermole said, quite quietly, so that only the stroke oar and the boy could have heard him:

"Which ship would that be, sir?"

The boy said he did not understand him. He said, "The Corinna, of course." And Cattermole said, "Yes, sir. Only I can't see the Corinna, sir, nor her lights neither, and I don't know as I could find her before daylight, and the battery will have their guns run out by then." And then he lifted his chin a little. Off the starboard bow, perhaps sixty or seventy yards away, low on the water, there was one yellow light, a riding lantern in the rigging of a vessel at anchor, smeared and swimming in the rain, but there.

"That's the only ship I can see, sir," said Cattermole. "Mr Dace said if we was parted we was to go alongside of her. I don't know what you want to do, sir. You're in command."

And he waited.

I stopped the boy there, and I got up and walked to the stern windows and stood with my back to him for a little, because I did not want him to see my face. I do not mind admitting it. I was moved. A seaman of no rank, with the officer dead in the bottom of the boat and a frightened boy giving him an order he thought was wrong, and he did not take the boat out of the boy's hands, which he could have done, and which half the coxswains in the service would have done, God bless them, and which most captains would have forgiven. He did not refuse the order. He did not argue it. He put one question, and he showed the boy the light, and he told the boy what the dead man had said, and then he gave him back the command. You're in command. I have known post-captains who never understood as much about command as that man showed in one question.

When I turned round the boy was still standing, and Hardy, who had stayed by the door, was looking very hard at the deckhead.

"Go on, Mr Lark," I said.

---

He said he looked at the light for a long time. I asked him how long and he did not know. Cattermole told me afterwards it was about as long as it takes to tie a reef-point, so I suppose it felt to the boy like a quarter of an hour.

Then the boy said, "Give way together. Starboard a little. Go alongside her, Cattermole."

And Cattermole said "Aye aye, sir" in exactly the same voice as before, and put the tiller over.

They took her as Mr Dace had said they would, though there were nine Frenchmen aboard instead of the six he had told them to expect, and two of the nine had been woken by the musket shot and were on deck with a boarding pike and a blunderbuss. The blunderbuss misfired in the wet. The pike went into Rennie's thigh and out again, and Rennie, who had wanted double grog, knocked the man down with the loom of his oar and sat on him. Cattermole went over the bow with a cutlass and an axe, as Mr Dace had arranged, and cut the cable at the hawse — four blows, the boy said; he counted them — and the boy went over the waist with the rest, and found himself in the dark of the little after-cabin with a Provençal master in his nightshirt who held up both hands and said something very fast that the boy did not understand, but understood well enough.

There is nothing much to say about the rest, except that it was hard work and that it was done well. The land wind came off the hills an hour after they cut her loose, exactly as Mr Dace had said it would, and they got the great lateen yard hoisted with the Frenchmen hauling alongside them, because a Provençal seaman would rather haul on a rope under a British cutlass than be drowned in a vessel going ashore under a French battery. The battery fired eleven shots at them into the rain, the boy said; he had counted those too. None of them came near. The cutter was towed astern with Mr Dace laid in her under a boat-cloak, and at first light they raised the Corinna, who was standing in towards the land to look for them, with her two lights still at the mizzen peak, burning pale in the morning.

Captain Moberly came to the gangway himself. And the boy, who had been awake for thirty hours and had a dead man's blood dried black up to the elbow of his right sleeve, went up the side and touched his hat and said that Lieutenant Dace was killed, and that the boat had boarded and carried the tartane, and that she was laden with oil and soap and wine, and that Rennie was hurt in the thigh. And he did not say anything about the order he had given under the battery, because he could not think how to say it on a quarterdeck in front of the whole ship's company, and because Cattermole was standing behind him, and Cattermole did not say anything either.

"And so it went into the letter," said Mr Lark, "the way the captain understood it. I have tried to tell him since, my lord. He said I was being modest and that it did me credit. He would not hear it. So when he sent the duplicate of the letter over to you, I asked to bring it. I thought you ought to know."

---

He finished. He was very white about the mouth and quite steady, and I liked him very much.

It is not every boy of fifteen who will come aboard the flagship and tell the admiral that the paragraph that would make his fortune is false. I have known grown men who would have let it stand and slept sound on it. I have, God forgive me, written one or two letters of my own in which I gave myself every word of credit that could be got from an action, and asked for more. I do not apologise for those; a man who does not look after his own name will find nobody else in the service doing it for him. But I know what it is to stand on a quarterdeck and keep quiet about something, and I know what it costs to come back afterwards and speak.

"Mr Lark," I said, "did you give the order to go alongside her?"

"Yes, my lord. But—"

"Did anyone give it but you?"

"No, my lord. But Cattermole—"

"Cattermole put a question to you," I said, "and you answered it. You had a dead officer at your feet, a battery awake over your head, and a rain that hid every light in the world but one, and you looked at that one light and you made up your mind. That is command, sir. There is nothing else to it. You are looking at a man who has given a great many orders, and I tell you that there has not been one of them that was not given in some kind of rain."

He did not look as though he believed me. Well. He is fifteen. He will.

"Who brought you over from the Corinna?" I said.

"Cattermole, my lord. He is in the boat."

"Hardy," I said, "be so good as to ask the coxswain of the Corinna's boat to step down here."

---

He was a big, stooping man of forty or so, from Yarmouth, which is to say from my own county, with a voice I could have found in any alehouse in Norfolk. He stood just inside the door dripping onto my deck-cloth and turning his hat round in his hands, and looked at the boy, and then at me, and then at nothing.

I asked him what had passed in the boat under the battery. He said Mr Lark had been in command and had ordered the boat to go alongside of the tartane, and they had took her.

"Mr Lark tells me," I said, "that he first ordered the boat back to the ship."

Cattermole considered this.

"It was a wet night, my lord," he said. "And a lot of noise. I may not have heard him right."

The boy opened his mouth, and Hardy, bless him, put a hand very lightly on his shoulder, and he shut it again.

"Cattermole," I said, "why did you not put the boat about? You are an old seaman. Mr Lark is a young gentleman, and he was very much shaken. You could have taken her back to the frigate yourself, or tried to, and no court in the service would have said a word against you."

Now he looked at me directly, for the first time.

"Begging your lordship's pardon," he said, "he was the officer. Mr Dace was dead. If I had took the boat off him, he wouldn't never have been the officer again. Not in that boat. Not with them men. Not with me." He turned the hat round once more. "And besides, my lord, Mr Dace had told us what to do. All of us. There weren't any need for me to take it off him. I only had to ask him did he remember."

---

I wrote to Captain Moberly that afternoon. I did not tell him his letter was wrong, because it was not wrong, or not in any way that a captain would understand from his quarterdeck, and I had no wish to set an honest officer against his own midshipman. I told him that I had seen Mr Lark and was very well satisfied with him, and that I should be glad to know of any vacancy that might suit him when his time was served. And I told him that I had heard from several quarters of the conduct of his coxswain, Job Cattermole, in the late boat action, and that if Captain Moberly saw fit to rate him boatswain's mate, I should consider it a particular favour to myself. Captain Moberly will rate him. Captains generally do grant an admiral his particular favours.

Then I wrote a line to Mr Dace's mother, which is never well done and which I have never yet done well.

The boy and the coxswain went down into the Corinna's boat at two bells in the afternoon watch. The wind had moderated, though there was a short ugly sea still running in the Sound, and I went out into the stern gallery with my glass to watch them pull away, because I wanted to see one thing.

Cattermole took the stroke oar. The boy sat down in the stern-sheets and took the tiller, as a midshipman ought, with the coxswain in front of him pulling, and laid her head for the frigate, and they went away across the grey water in the spray. Not once, all the way across the Sound, did he turn round to look back at the flagship for a signal. I watched him the whole way. I had my glass on him until they hooked on at the Corinna's main chains, and he went up her side first.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ab Horātiō Nelsōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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