Word: nelson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When the guns stopped firing off Cape Trafalgar in October 1805, a young seaman sat down and wrote to his father: "Our dear Admiral Nelson is killed...
Some such emotion has crept into the work of most biographers of Horatio Nelson, England's No. 1 naval hero. Even the U.S.'s precise, levelheaded Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan allowed the legend of Nelson to skew up the accuracy of his portrait. British Admiral Sir W. M. James (who spent 18 months during World...
...working in an office aboard Nelson's old flagship Victory) has tried to chart a sounder course. His seamanship may be better and his course truer, but when the voyage ends he has made the same port where other biographers have tied up. The Nelson who strides down the gangplanks of The Durable Monument is less legendary and more human than the Nelson of earlier biographies, but he is still the great captain of Britain's long and memorable naval history...
Fortitude Interludes. Contrary to the common belief that Nelson was a "very delicate man," the best evidence is that he was unusually robust. He had a morbid fear of serious illness, and it made him a self-centered hypochondriac; his letters swarmed with such remarks as: "I ... venture to say [that] a very short space of time will send me to that bourne from which none return . . ." To most of his seamen he was the kindest, gentlest hero imaginable; to his Sea Lords he was exasperatingly 'vindictive, suspicious and intolerant. He was as alarmingly unstable as a prima donna...
...Nelson's fortitude and judgment, Admiral James sadly admits, fade from sight during the interludes on the Continent with his mistress, Emma Hamilton. "Antony and Moll Cleopatra" (as they were named by one onlooker) turned the courts of Vienna, Prague, Dresden and Naples (where husband Sir William Hamilton was ambassador) into uproar. Emma guzzled champagne and gambled with Nelson's money. Nelson, down by the stern in an alcoholic sea, roared demands for songs in his own praise, and aged, cuckolded Hamilton, merry as a grig, "performed feats of activity, hopping around the room on his backbone...