There are times, in fact – so complete is the absence of ‘colour’, so absolute the sense of purpose and concentration in his adult letters – when it feels as though one is following a man through a sensory desert. Over the last ten years of the Napoleonic Wars he served and fought from the China Seas to the Gulf of Mexico, yet one would no more know from Hastings what it felt like to be shipwrecked in the icy black waters off Halifax than how shattering it was to drag a massive naval gun through the swamps and bayous of New Orleans.
The magical island fortresses of the Ligurian Sea, the baroque grandeur of Valetta, the feckless elegance of Nauplia’s Palamidi fortress, the harsh and brilliant clarity of the Cyclades, the romance of the Dardanelles, the numinous charge that attaches itself to the landscape of Greece – these were the background to his fighting life, but one would need one’s longitudes and latitudes to know it. It was not that Hastings was blind to either people or place – he was a naval officer trained to see and record – but where other men looked at modern Nafpaktos and saw historic Lepanto, Hastings looked at Lepanto and saw Nafpaktos; where other men saw the harbour from which the Argo sailed or the little ribbon of island on which Spartan soldiers first surrendered, Hastings saw only currents, breezes, lines of fire and anchorages.
It cannot have been always so – he was too intelligent, too widely cultured, too well-liked, too much a man of the Age of Byron for that – and no such child can have excited the intense affection and dread with which family and friends awaited the news from Trafalgar. The first despatches from Collingwood had reached Falmouth after a voyage of only eight days, but for the families in the great houses, cottages, vicarages and deaneries that serviced the navy the arrival of the schooner Pickle signalled just the start of the waiting. ‘Thursday 7th Nov. I was much alarmed by Nelly’s ghastly appearance immediately after breakfast,’ Betsey Fremantle wrote in her journal, the day after Collingwood’s despatches reached London,
who came in to say Dudley had brought from Winslow the account that a most dreadful action had been fought off Cadiz, Nelson & several Captains killed, & twenty ships were taken. I really felt undescribable misery until the arrival of the Post, but was relieved from such a wretched state of anxious suspense by a letter from Lord Garlies, who congratulated me on Fremantle’s safety & the conspicuous share he had in the Victory gained on the 21st off Cadiz … I fear the number of killed and wounded will be very great when the returns are sent. How thankful I am Fremantle has once more escaped unhurt. The accounts greatly shook my nerves.
For the Hastings family, immured in the middle of the English countryside with their maps and their fears, the wait was still longer. ‘I should certainly not have delayed so long writing to you had I not so much leisure on my hands,’ Frank’s father at last wrote to Warren Hastings more than six weeks after the battle.
Great inclination to oblige, frequent opportunities of doing it and a thorough conviction of its propriety, all this made the matter so easy that I never failed every morning at breakfast to declare my intention, always however determining to put it off to the last moment of the post, in order to send you news, which not coming, I thought it hardly worthwhile to trouble you, and so it went on until the glorious victory of Trafalgar was announced when my anxiety for your little protégé my son Frank only eleven years old who was on board the Neptune so damped my spirits, & absorbed every other consideration, as to render me unfit for any other thing, and it was not till about ten days ago that our minds were set at ease by the returns of the Neptune at last arriving, and also seeing a letter from my little Hero which completely dissipated every anxiety.
The wait had put a strain on even his oldest and closest friendship – Lord Moira, thinking that Frank was with Cornwallis in the Channel had written flippantly to Charles Hastings – but when the news came everything was forgotten in the flood of relief and goodwill. ‘Most truly do I congratulate you,’ Moira wrote almost immediately again, ‘… on the safety of your Frank … When he comes to be prosing in his cane chair at Fourscore it will be a fine thing to have to boast of sharing the glory in the Battle of Trafalgar.’
‘My Dear General,’ wrote the Duke of Northumberland – another old soldier in the American Wars with a son in the navy,
I have longed for some time to congratulate you on the English Victory gained over the combined fleets of France & Spain, but could not do so till I saw an authenticated List of the killed and wounded. Last night relieved me from my difficulties, & brought me the Gazette Extraordinary, & I now therefore take the earliest opportunity of writing to say how happy I am that my friend your youngster has had his share in so glorious a Victory unhurt. I hope he likes the Sea as well as ever, and flatter myself, He will in time prove another Lord Collingwood. I should have said Nelson but that I would prefer his being a Great Living Naval Character, to a dead one.
There was more than a touch of Jane Austen’s Mrs Musgrove about Parnell Hastings, and as the letters flowed in at Willesley anxiety gave way to a pride every bit as extravagant. ‘Mrs Hastings is a great bore,’ Fremantle wrote back to his wife, after she had complained of the Hastings dragging ‘poor’ Captain Arklom – previously in Neptune – to dinner to ply him with ‘silly questions about their Boy’.
I am afraid Hastings will shoot me, for the first Lieutenant thinking such a small child could not be of use on Deck desired him to go below, which he did without remorse, but is now ashamed of it and have wrote to his father something on the Subject, you must call upon the Woman, and say what is really true that he is a very clever and well disposed boy, and very attentive to his Navigation, if you are half as fidgety about your Doddy who seems to occupy you so much, I will break every bone in your skin.
There is a foreshadowing here of the older Hastings – morbidly sensitive, proud, honourable, intense – and probably a glimpse, too, of the endless teasing and ragging that was part and parcel of a gun-room world that hovered between the chivalries of war and the brute realities of a floating prep school. ‘Young Hastings get [sic] Volumes by every opportunity,’ Fremantle wrote to his wife, as the Neptune resumed blockading duties off Cádiz. ‘His mother put his letters to my address without an envelope, but the part opposite the seal concluded with your Affe. Mother it made no difference, as I did not read a Sylable [sic], indeed if I had I conclude it contained much what Mothers write to their Children at that age.’
Child or not, though – and Hastings was now just twelve – there was a career to be planned for him if he was to be a second Collingwood, and on 2 June 1806 he was transferred by boat from the Neptune to the forty-two-gun Sea Horse under the command of Captain John Stewart. In his later years Hastings never forgot the seamanship and sheer endurance demanded by a winter blockade in Neptune, but the frigate and not the lumbering three-decker was the glamour ship of the navy, the vessel in which captains made their names and fortunes and young officers and midshipmen had their chance to punch above their rank and weight.
The move was the making of Hastings – the Sea Horse the perfect training in the kind of coastal warfare he would make his own – but before that there was convoy duty and a return to England for the first time in eighteen months. ‘My boy of Trafalgar is just arrived,’ Sir Charles wrote proudly to Warren Hastings from Willesley on 2 November, only five days after the Sea Horse anchored at Portsmouth: ‘he appears an unlicked cub – but is considerably advanced in nautical knowledge for his age and time of service – he is only thirteen [twelve in fact] last Febry has been but a year and a half at sea, and is as capable of keeping a day’s reckoning, putting the ship about, in short navigating a ship on board, and that is according to the Capt’s testimony.’
This was not all blind partiality – the only fault Captain Stewart could find with his charge was that he would not grow – and Warren Hastings was more than happy to respond in kind. ‘I think you have much happiness yet in store,’ he wrote back. ‘You will live to see one of your sons a finished gentleman; and the other standing on the summit of glory as a British seaman. Charles Imhoff [Warren Hastings’s stepson] tells me he never saw a youth so much improved, in knowledge, manners or manliness, as the latter in the short time in which he has not seen him.’
Frank