Editorial Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. Robert Southey, Poet Laureate and biographer of Nelson. This is the twenty-first edition of The Trafalgar Chronicleand as such this year may be said to mark a coming of age, an event that surely deserves a measure of congratulation and modest celebration. Still buoyed by the optimism of its relative youth, the journal continues to look forward to future years with energy and confidence, despite the challenging economic times we all face. We know little or nothing of how Horatio Nelson may have marked his own special birthday because he left no specific record for 29 September 1779. But we do know that by that date the sketch of his life had taken recognisable shape and form. He had already risen to a remarkable height in the ranks of the Royal Navy compared to many of his contemporaries. In early June that year he was made a Post Captain, one of the most important moments in a young officer’s career. The future looked bright. That September found him ashore in Jamaica, poised to take command of the 28-gun frigateHinchinbroke, a French privateer captured as a prize off Cuba. It was said to leak like an old bucket, but – and most important – it put young Nelson on the captains’ list. He spent the month sorting out his crew of some two hundred men, before leaving in early October to join ships patrolling the Lesser Antilles to the southeast and with them the promise of riches in captured Spanish prizes. Yet, later in his twenty-first year Nelson’s fortunes were altogether changed. Invalided by a recurrence of malaria in the jungles of Costa Rica after the woeful expedition to San Juan and Lake Nicaragua, he was evacuated down river by canoe, then taken by sloop to Kingston where he was carried ashore in his cot. The doctors’ verdict and prognosis made grim reading and recommended as his only chance an immediate change of climate. Nelson was promptly discharged and returned to England by ship. Battered and broken by hard service, the young man returned home with his tail between his legs. But young Nelson was no stranger to fickle fortune. The boy born in an obscure corner of rural England had already seen both its sides by the time of vi
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