Free Nelson: The Essential Hero by Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford

Locker’s benefit, just in case there was any chance of a new command in the offing.
    In every respect his life to date might have been paralleled by that of many another naval officer, except perhaps for his quick rise to post-captain. Many were taken ill with fevers - many recovered - but few, though, so readily impressed the senior officers with whom they came in contact that there was lurking within them some especial spark which one day, given luck or opportunity, would set them apart from other men. His life continued humdrum, although he did get his new appointment: this time to a 28-gun frigate, the Albemarle , in which he spent the winter of ’81 on convoy duty to the Baltic and back. It was a far call from his last station, but the cold of the North Sea and the Baltic - about which he complained - most probably did his health a great deal more good than if he had been returned to the West Indies or sent out to the East. Ordered once more on convoy duty, this time to Quebec, he wrote bitterly : 'I want so much to get off this d—d voyage. Mr Adair has told me that if I was sent to a cold damp climate it would make me worse than ever.’
    Nelson’s illnesses were real enough, and no less than fourteen different occasions have been recorded on which he suffered among other things from malaria, pains in his chest and lungs, ‘rheumatic fever’ and severe physical breakdown accompanied by mental depression. All this was quite apart from the later wounds, and the seasickness which he mentioned on numerous occasions (‘Heavy sea, sick to death - this seasickness I shall never get over’ - as late as August 1801). He was to undergo more operations than any other flag-officer. Yet despite all this, his slight frame, driven by the wind of a desire for fame - or rather a passionate search after ‘Honour’ - was to carry him through where many an apparently stronger constitution yielded. The fact is, as his correspondence bears out, that Nelson was something of a hypochondriac. His sickly childhood, his damaged health in youth, were to give him a constant concern about his health that the more robust never possess. As an old Norfolk saying has it: ‘A creaking gate lasts for ever.’
    A bad passage across the Atlantic, not so surprising in spring, when the north-westerlies hurl themselves across in what can sometimes seem not a succession of gales but a permanent one, found Nelson with part of his convoy at the unattractive gate of Britain’s senior colony. He thought little of it - ‘this disagreeable place’ he said of St John’s -but had to admit that ‘the voyage agrees better with me than I expected’. The tone of his letters throughout all this period is dull and almost rancorous: not so surprising when one considers that his services in the West Indies, which had nearly cost him his life, would in modern times have earned him something like a year ashore on sick leave. Possibly he should never have been passed fit for the Albemarle , but the fact was that he could not afford to be ‘on the beach’ so long as there was a war, a chance of action and of prize money. Promotion he could not of course expect to see for many years, since he had already advanced as far as any sea-officer could do by the age of twenty-three.
    It was in Canada, in Quebec, that Nelson first shook off the illnesses that had been plaguing him, and here also that he first fell in love. Everything in his letters to date would suggest that he was not only sexually inexperienced — somewhat rare for that time — but that he had never been in any way emotionally moved. His experiences among the midshipmen with their free-and-easy sex lives, his knowledge of Chatham and Portsmouth, of the sailors and their women (who were quite often carried at sea aboard the larger vessels), had most certainly given the son of the parsonage a distinct distaste not for the opposite sex, but for carnality as such. Nelson’s attitude towards women would