One of the most famous naval heroes in history suffered from seasickness.
Britain’s celebrated Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson was essentially the living embodiment of the hardscrabble “Four Yorkshiremen” of the classic Monty Python sketch. As a young naval officer, he lost sight in his right eye from gravel strewn by an incoming cannonball. A few years later, he had his right arm amputated — without anesthetic — after being shot in the heat of another battle. Lord Nelson also weathered the debilitating effects of malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis, scurvy, and dysentery at various points in his life. But the cruelest affliction may well have been the seasickness that plagued him for the duration of his three-plus decades at sea.
This unfortunate condition was revealed to many with the public display of an 1804 letter in which Lord Nelson, then head of the British fleet in the Mediterranean, described his longtime struggles with boat-rocking waves. “I am ill every time it blows hard and nothing but my enthusiastic love for my profession keeps me one hour at sea,” he wrote. Yet the seasickness hardly kept him from achieving stunning victories at the 1798 Battle of the Nile and the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen, the latter of which famously featured him holding a telescope to his blind eye and pretending not to see an order to retreat. While his death amid the British triumph over Napoleon’s army at the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar kept him from enjoying the spoils of success like the Monty Python characters, Nelson did them one better by becoming the first nonroyal to receive a state funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
