Horatio Nelson Speaks to the 21st Century?

Barbary Wars

The novels of the Cutler Family Chronicles span the years 1774 to 1815 and have, as backdrops, the creation of the U.S. Navy and the emergence of the United States as an overseas commercial power during the Age of Sail.

During the last fifteen years of this period the United States became inevitably embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars that were ravaging Europe. During America’s quasi-war with France in the late 1790s, and again during the First Barbary War in the early nineteenth century, Great Britain viewed the fledgling United States as an ally, either because we were fighting the same enemy – France – or because Britain and her overseas colonies desperately wanted to buy what America had to sell. Aside from exchanging private recognition signals with American warships and escorting American merchantmen through pirate-infested waters, the Royal Navy opened its bases in the West Indies and the Mediterranean to American naval vessels.

Admiral Horatio Nelson

The early years of the Napoleonic Wars were also the capstone years of England’s most revered naval hero: Horatio Nelson. Richard Cutler, the main protagonist in the Cutler Family Chronicles, comes to know Nelson primarily because his wife Katherine, a young woman born and raised in the shadow of English aristocracy, was once engaged to marry the dashing young post captain. Although Katherine never again sees Horatio after she weds Richard Cutler and sails to America, the two sea officers have several occasions to cross tacks with each other during the years preceding the epic sea battle off the southwest coast of Spain in 1805 that immortalized Nelson’s life. 

One such occasion (in the recently published A Call to Arms) is in November of 1803 prior to a grand fete hosted by Sir Alexander Ball, the British governor of Malta, at the island’s magnificent San Anton Palace. Adm. Horatio Lord Nelson, commander in chief of British forces in the Mediterranean, and Captain Richard Cutler, USN, are meeting in private before the gala affair begins. With them in the small but comfortably appointed room are Captain Jeremy Hardcastle, RN, Richard’s brother-n-law and Nelson’s life-long friend, and Agreen Crabtree, Richard’s first officer in USS Portsmouth. A story that Jeremy has to relate to Richard and Agreen follows an account by Agreen regarding an earlier encounter between Portsmouth and a Tripolitan corsair. After the corsair captain strikes his colors and surrenders his ship, he orders his gun crews to open fire on the American frigate as she is lowering away her boats, an act of cowardice and dishonor that kills a number of defenseless American sailors. Captain Cutler immediately orders all sail clapped on and chases after the corsair, fleeing for her life toward the safety of Tunis. Portsmouth overtakes the corsair and reduces her to matchwood.

 What Jeremy Hardcastle has to relate is historically accurate in detail, as is the gist of Nelson’s response to Agreen’s comment. (Note: also historically accurate is the treachery of the corsair captain.)

We should listen carefully to what Nelson has to say.

    “It started right here off Malta,” Jeremy explained. “For no apparent reason two Algerian corsairs attacked one of our sloops of war. The sloop managed to escape into Grand Harbor, and a frigate was dispatched to hunt down the two corsairs and sink them. Which she did. The dey of Algiers, a chap named Mustapha, was so enraged he ordered British citizens in Algiers imprisoned and their property confiscated. When Horatio learned of that, he led Victory and a squadron of seven frigates from Toulon to Algiers and immediately started bombarding the city. Within an hour, the dey sent out a boat to the flagship under a white flag. Horatio paid it no mind. He kept the guns hot until the outer wall of Algiers had collapsed and fires were burning within the city. Finally, the dey had himself rowed out to the flagship, pleading to Horatio and Allah for mercy. I can’t speak for Allah, but Horatio agreed on the condition that he release British citizens from prison, restore their possessions, and compensate them for their trouble. And on the condition that Mustapha promise never again to impugn England’s honor. Thus far, he has acted the angelic school boy, bowing and scraping before a stern school master. Is that a fair summation, Horatio?”
    “I daresay it is,” Nelson responded.
    “And I daresay the dey learned a hard lesson that day,” Agreen added, setting off a round of chuckles.
    “I agree with you, Agreen,” Nelson said gravely,” and I am not trying to be witty in saying that. Mustapha learned the same lesson as your corsair captain. And those with Western minds must learn it as well: that the only thing these Arab despots seem to understand is brute force. That is the only anecdote to their tactics. They use diplomacy as either a tool to get what they want or as a delaying tactic. That is one reason I would not have an Arab in my fleet, except as a prisoner.”

Putting aside for the moment the politically correct world in which we live, had the State Department heeded Nelson’s words more diligently, would the four Americans killed during the terrorist attack on Benghazi last September be alive today?

I simply pose the question.

The Lore Of Port Royal, Jamaica

Illustration of pre-1692 Port Royal, Jamaica.

Port Royal, Jamaica has a rich history. Founded in 1618, it is located at the end of a spit of land at the mouth of Kingston Harbor.  From its earliest days it served as a refuge for English privateers preying on Spanish treasure ships sailing home from the New to the Old World.  When the British Parliament began limiting the number of letters of marque – official documents that essentially transformed a privately owned vessel into a government-sanctioned ship of war -- many privateers tossed aside the thin veil of legitimacy and resorted to outright piracy.

Whatever their means of income, the wealth they amassed and liberally circulated in Port Royal turned that commercial center into one of the gaudiest and most depraved ports-of-call in the seven seas.  To quote from The Power and the Glory, the third volume of the Cutler Family Chronicles:  

“Richard Cutler knew something of the history of Port Royal, as did most people familiar with the West Indies.  Situated at the western tip of a long, thin spit of land shaped like an ostrich leg with an Italy-shaped boot at its western end, it was, in its heyday in the late 1600’s, the largest, richest and most debauched British municipality in the Western Hemisphere, justly earning its dubious distinction as “Sodom of the West Indies.”  With an economy heaped in gold bullion plundered by English privateers off Spanish treasure fleets, Port Royal served as a safe-haven for pirates, buccaneers, cutthroats, and other low-lives keeping intimate company with the thieves, whores and other opportunists keen to pick a farthing or a florin from an unsuspecting tar dead to the world on a alehouse floor or in a dark alley rife with the stench of human waste and proliferation.  In 1680, Port Royal was said to host a tavern for every ten residents.  Inside those taverns, or on the streets outside, prostitutes brazenly plied their wares, their oft-used bodies tantalizing pie-eyed sailors too long away at sea.  

Henry Morgan, Pirate of the
Caribbean, 18th century lithography.

Tottering at the tip of the societal pyramid, the town’s few respectable citizens – merchants, mainland planters, an Anglican priest or two -- pooled their resources and appointed Henry Morgan, the renowned buccaneer and sworn enemy of propriety and Puritanism, as lieutenant governor.  It was a seemingly insane gamble that paid off.  Elevated from the base to the apex of society, Morgan found religion and set about to clean up the unholy mess, publicly hanging many of those with whom just a few weeks before he had been in cahoots.  His efforts, however, proved too little, too late.  At eleven forty-two in the morning of June 7, 1692, in what was widely perceived as divine punishment for its manifold sins and wickedness, Port Royal was rocked to its core by a violent earthquake that sent much of the city sinking, Atlantis-like, into the sea.  Those few who managed to survive the holocaust fled across the bay to the mainland, where, in collaboration with the sugar planters and wealthier merchants already living there, they established a new commercial center.  With the devastation of Port Royal fresh in their minds, these citizens of Kingston, as the new community came to be called, lived and worked and prayed as paragons of sobriety and Christian morals – until memories faded. 

What remained of Port Royal, meanwhile, was appropriated by the Royal Navy and re-built as its flagship base in the West Indies.”

At the end of the eighteenth century, as the United States and France waged an undeclared war known to history as the Quasi-War, the Royal Navy opened all of its West Indian bases, including its flagship base at Port Royal, to the fledgling American navy.  Why?  Because as Rear Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson famously explained to My Lords of the Admiralty, “Every American gun aimed at a French warship is one less English gun aimed at a French warship.”  Such good feelings between the United Sates and Great Britain were to extend into the first four years of the 1800’s.  After that, relations deteriorated, due to England’s fight for national survival against Napoleon and the commercial war in which the United States found herself inevitably entangled.   Despite the war raging in Europe and subsequent events, Port Royal retained its vitality (if not its depravity) until 1905, when Great Britain closed what was once one of its premier navy yards in the Western Hemisphere. 

Cutler Family Chronicles

This is the first blog profiling the naval, commercial, social and political history of the United States during the Age of Sail, as depicted in the Cutler Family Chronicles. Novels in the series are published by the Naval Institute Press located in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Cutler Family Chronicles is a projected seven-book series profiling the best of American duty, honor and courage during the Age of Fighting Sail. Years covered in the series are 1774 to 1815, from the American Revolution to the Second Barbary War. All seven novels have as a backdrop the creation of the U.S. Navy and the emergence of the United States as a commercial power on the world stage. All novels feature the seafaring Cutler family of Hingham, Massachusetts, as well as a supporting and ever expanding cast of characters.

While these novels feature plenty of swashbuckling sea action, they also reveal close interpersonal relationships among family members and friends. At their core they chronicle a life-long love story between Richard Cutler, the main protagonist, and the love of his life, English-born Katherine Hardcastle Cutler. Together, Richard and Katherine interact in intriguing ways with other men of honor and women of passion, some fictional, many of them real historical characters such as John Paul Jones, Thomas Jefferson, Horatio Nelson, John Adams, Stephen Decatur, Edward Preble, Isaac Hull, Oliver Hazard Perry, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Each historical character has been studiously researched and each novel has been vetted for historical accuracy.

Come sail in the breeze with Ranger, Bonhomme Richard, Falcon, USS Constellation and USS Constitution as the fledgling United States confronts, in the Revolution, the world’s greatest sea power, and then, in the Quasi-War with France, the world’s greatest land power. Along the way, and in the years following, America’s first naval heroes take on the Barbary States, twice, and England a second time, along with vipers’ nests in pirate-infested waters from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, and to the Indian Ocean and beyond.