"I will be a hero."(book on Lord Horatio Nelson)(Book Review)

Edgar Vincent Nelson: Love and Fame. Yale University Press, 640 pages, $35

Decisive naval battles are the rarest of military engagements. The difficulty of finding and closing with your enemy has always meant that naval warfare is extended periods of boredom followed by short sharp battles from which the loser could usually slip away before total destruction.

Horatio Nelson gave the lie to this. His career reads as a successful effort not to beat his enemy, but annihilate him. The brief hours of his battles shifted the balance of power in Europe. Why Nelson was the most successful naval commander in history becomes abundantly clear in Edgar Vincent's new biography. It is the best modern book on the admiral and one of the best biographies of its kind that I have read.

Born to a provincial Norfolk rector in 1758, Horatio Nelson early believed his career was a call to glory. Writing an account of his life in 1799, he recalled a youthful vision he had aboard ship while recovering from malaria:

 
   A sudden glow of patriotism was kindled 
   within me, and presented my king and 
   country as my patron. My mind exulted in the 
   idea. "Well then" I exclaimed, "I will be a 
   hero, and confiding in Providence I will brave 
   every danger." 

This ambition manifested itself first in physical courage. At every engagement, Nelson personified the sailor's saying of "Aft the most honour, forward the better man."

The formative influence in Nelson's life was his maternal uncle, Maurice Suckling, a navy captain. In 1770, at the age twelve, the young Horatio begged for and received a place on his uncle's ship, going up the side of HMS Raisonnable. Of the thirty-five years left to him, twenty-eight were spent at sea. With the help of his uncle, who had risen to become comptroller of the Royal Navy, Nelson rose through the ranks to captain.