1735-1823

The renown of Nelson is part of the heritage of the world.  His deeds, although their full scope and real significance have been but little understood, stand out conspicuous among a host of lesser achievements, and are become to mankind the symbol of Great Britain’s maritime power in that tremendous era when it drove the French Revolution back upon itself, stifling its excesses, and so insuring the survival of the beneficent tendencies which for a time seemed well nigh lost in the madness of the nation.

The appearance of a prodigy like Nelson, however, is not an isolated event, independent of antecedents.  It is the result of a happy meeting of genius and opportunity.  The hour has come, and the man.  Other men have labored, and the hero enters into their labors; not unjustly, for thereto he also has been appointed by those special gifts which fit him to reap as theirs fitted them to sow.  In relation to Nelson and his career, the illustrious officer whose most distinguishing characteristics we have now to trace stood pre-eminent among many forerunners.  It was he, above all others, who made the preparation indispensable to the approaching triumphal progress of the first of British naval heroes, so that his own work underlies that of his successor, as foundation supports superstructure.  There is not between them the vital connection of root to branch, of plant to fruit.  In the matter of professional kinship Nelson has far more in common with Hood.  Between these there is an identity of kind, an orderly sequence of development, an organic bond, such as knits together the series of a progressive evolution.  It is not so with Jervis.  Closely conjoined as the two men long were in a common service, and in mutual admiration and sympathy, it would be an error to think of the elder as in any sense the professional progenitor of the younger; yet he was, as it were, an adoptive father, who from the first fostered, and to the last gloried in, the genius which he confessed unparalleled.  “It does not become me to make comparisons,” he wrote after Copenhagen; “all agree that there is but one Nelson.”  And when the great admiral had been ten years in his grave, he said of an officer’s gallant conduct at the Battle of Algiers, “He seems to have felt Lord Nelson’s eye upon him;” as though no stronger motive could be felt nor higher praise given.

John Jervis was born on the 20th of January, 1735, at Meaford, in Staffordshire.  He was intended for his father’s profession, the law; but, by his own account, a disinclination which was probably natural became invincible through the advice of the family coachman.  “Don’t be a lawyer, Master Jacky,” said the old man; “all lawyers are rogues.”  Sometime later, his father receiving the appointment of auditor to Greenwich Hospital, the family removed to the neighborhood of London; and there young Jervis, being thrown in contact with ships and seamen, and particularly with a midshipman of his own age, became confirmed in his wish to go to sea.  Failing to get his parents’ consent, he ran away towards the close of the year 1747.  From this escapade he was brought back; but his father, seeing the uselessness of forcing the lad’s inclinations, finally acquiesced, though it seems likely, from his after conduct, that it was long before he became thoroughly reconciled to the disappointment.