Word: nelsons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Lord Nelson is the name given in Royal Navy wardrooms to a poker hand containing three Jacks. In the British tradition of understatement, this may or may not bear reference to the fact that Horatio, Lord Nelson, was a man with one eye, one arm and one idea-to beat the French. The latest and one of the best of the great sailor's biographies logs in scholarly detail the main tacks of a gusty life that carried him to the top of the column in London's Trafalgar Square-not to mention the Nelson monument in Dublin...
...Nelson was born in 1758, at a time when Dr. Samuel Johnson could see little difference between life at sea and life in prison, except that at sea there was the added hazard of drowning. Yet Nelson, a parson's sickly son, lived to cast an aura of gaiety and gallantry over the squalid business of being a ship's officer. He was a prudent sailor, a superb professional in the chancy matters of wind, tide, hemp, oak, canvas and gunpowder, at a time when a man-o'-war was a floating firecracker rather than a seagoing...
...within his code, a gentle man, beloved by officers and crew. His sailors were "brave fellows" and a "band of brothers." Nelson set a good table and a stern example. That he lived to save Europe from Napoleon is something of a miracle, and British Biographer Warner (a naval buff from the time he sat at Caius College, Cambridge, beneath a portrait of Nelson's father) has shown a hagiographer's diligence in turning over the records of England's seagoing lay saint...
Billows & Pillows. In his portrait, Author Warner tells a great many of the old Nelson stories, and some unfamiliar ones. Example: as a midshipman at 14, Nelson found himself on an expedition to the Arctic. He tried to kill a polar bear to get its skin for his father. He missed the beast with his first shot and wanted to clobber it with a clubbed musket...
...shrewdness, bravery and romanticism of such escapades Nelson wore through life like his own elegant uniforms. He served as a ship's captain at 20, and soon earned his rank in an insane bit of primitive amphibious warfare in the West Indies. (Yellow Jack killed most of his comrades.) He lost the sight of his right eye as a result of a wound suffered during the siege of Calvi on Corsica, and his arm storming the fortified town of Tenerife with a force of sailors in longboats...