Having to resign the _Janus_ probably caused Nelson more torture than his physical suffering, for he was intensely ambitious. It is stated that when he arrived in England he would not proceed to Bath to drink the waters until he had been conveyed to the Admiralty to beg for another vessel. “This they readily promised me,” he observed in a humorous way, “thinking it not possible for me to live.” At Bath he stayed with Mr Spry, an apothecary, who resided at 2 Pierrepont Street; his medical adviser was Dr Woodward.
On the 23rd January 1781 Nelson was able to inform Captain Locker that he was “now upon the mending hand,” although he had been “obliged to be carried to and from bed, with the most excruciating tortures.” Some three weeks later further progress was reported; “My health, thank God, is very near perfectly restored; and I have the perfect use of all my limbs, except my left arm, which I can hardly tell what is the matter with it. From the shoulder to my fingers’ ends are as if half dead; but the surgeon and doctors give me hopes it will all go off. I most sincerely wish to be employed, and hope it will not be long.”
Again the flicker of ambition is evident, always a good sign in a patient. “I never was so well in health that I can remember,” he writes on the 5th March. On Monday of the following week he began his return journey to London. Unfortunately his progress was intermittent. He had “good” days and “bad” days. Two months later we find Nelson telling his beloved brother William that he has entirely lost the use of his left arm and nearly of his left leg and thigh. However, the surgeon who was attending him gave him hopes of recovery, “when I will certainly come into Norfolk, and spend my time there till I am employed.”
At this period Nelson did not have to eat out his heart in chagrin and disappointment owing to neglect as some of our modern naval officers have had to do. In August 1781, when his health had improved, he was given command of the _Albemarle_, a frigate of 28 guns, and on the 23rd of that month he hoisted his pennant at Woolwich. The appearance of the little vessel pleased him considerably, his officers and men even more so, as his letters abundantly testify. “My quarter-deck is filled, much to my satisfaction, with very genteel young men and seamen”; “I have an exceeding good ship’s company. Not a man or officer in her I would wish to change”; “I am perfectly satisfied with both officers and ship’s company. All my marines are likewise old standers,” are some of his remarks to correspondents. We must not imagine that Nelson necessarily had a pattern-ship and a pattern-crew because of the kind things he said of them. His recent recovery from serious illness has doubtless to be taken into consideration. We all see the world and its inhabitants through rose-coloured glasses after an enforced absence from the ordinary duties and modes of life. A natural sweetness of disposition may also partly account for his optimism. In later years Samuel Rogers, the Banker-poet, recorded in his entertaining “Table Talk” that “Lord Nelson was a remarkably kind-hearted man. I have seen him spin a teetotum with his _one_ hand, a whole evening, for the amusement of some children.”