Horatio Nelson

What failed

A fever on the San Juan River in Nicaragua nearly killed him in 1780. In the West Indies his enforcement of the Navigation Acts against illegal trading set him against his commander-in-chief, Admiral Sir Richard Hughes, and in 1787 he was put on half pay. He spent the next five years ashore with no ship. At Calvi in July 1794 an enemy shot drove sand and stone splinters into his right eye and ruined its sight. In July 1797 his assault on Santa Cruz de Tenerife failed outright, and a musket ball shattered his right arm, which was amputated aboard ship that night. Three days later he wrote to his commander-in-chief asking to be sent home.

What happened next

That letter, the first he wrote left-handed, said he had become a burden to his friends and useless to his country. Twelve months later he destroyed the French fleet at the Nile. Seven years after that came Trafalgar.

The point

The eye stayed in its socket and he never wore a patch; that is a later invention. The telescope held to the blind eye at Copenhagen rests on a single eyewitness, Colonel William Stewart, whose narrative was written for Clarke and M'Arthur's biography of 1809, and the National Maritime Museum's own chronology calls the gesture alleged. The defiance is not in doubt, and neither is the letter, in his left hand, saying he was finished.