Footnotes

NELSON TO ONE OF HIS FRIGATE CAPTAINS: Captain, later Rear-Admiral, Lord Mark Kerr (1776-1840), recipient of this and the following orders, was third son of the fifth Marquess of Lothian, and had served with Macartney's embassy to China of 1792 and at the capture of Minorca in 1798. He was also a gifted artist in watercolour, producing not only accomplished topographical views, but fantastical renderings of monsters and their like, examples of which are to be found in albums of the period; see Hector McDonnell, ʻThe Strange, Strange World of Admiral Lord Mark Kerr: Nelson's Surrealist Captain at the Time of Trafalgar', The British Art Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Autumn 2005), pp. 28-30.

Kerr's ship, the Fisgard was a 44-gun frigate built by the French as La Résistance in 1793 and taken into British service after being captured at the Battle of Fishguard in 1797. As captain of a frigate, Kerr held an enviable command. Not only was he spared much of the routine of blockade-work, but he was in a far better position to take lucrative prizes, as is demonstrated by the list of ships captured during the last three months of 1804 (included in the lot). This itemises eleven prizes in which the Fisgard claimed a share, only one of these being shared with the Victory and the squadron as a whole. Nelson favoured a system of open blockade, by which he stayed out of the view of the enemy in hopes of luring them out to sea and into battle (as of course happened at Trafalgar), and for this frigates were vital: they were, as he famously put it, the eyes of the fleet.

For as long as Spain remained out of the war, Rosas remained one of his most important supply bases: ʻhere Nelson had the good fortune to encounter another who became a significant prop of his command. Edward Gayner was a merchant of Rosas, the deep-water port within a day's sailing of Toulon. A fortyish English Quaker from Bristol, he saw the British fleet as a rare opportunity to combine business with patriotism... Spain was uncomfortable about supplying the British in bulk, but despite impediments Gayner arranged for abundant supplies of fresh meat, water, wine and fuel and some fruit, vegetables, corn and fish to be collected at Rosas, devising methods to speed up turnaround and avoid the necessity of British sailors going ashore, where they might attract unwelcome official notice or desert' (John Sugden, Nelson: The Sword of Albion, 2012, p. 704).

The text of this and the following documents are in the hand of Nelson's secretary John Scott, responsible for his official correspondence; Nelson's foreign and confidential correspondence being handled by the Victory's chaplain, Alexander John Scott. The formulaic headings reciting Nelson's rank and titles have, as one might expect, been written out beforehand and are in the handwriting of one of Scott's clerks. (We are grateful to his descendants for allowing us to compare the handwriting of these documents with that of John Scott's private correspondence.)

Neither this nor any of the following lots are published by Nicholas Harris Nicolas, The Dispatches and Letters of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, 1844-46.