(Dis)Able-Bodied Seamen: A “Nelson Knife” at the National Maritime Museum

Jamie Clifford, WPAMC ’25

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London is a treasure trove of artifacts relating to the Royal Navy and British maritime history. While visiting the Nelson, Navy and Nation gallery, a group of three unusual objects caught my attention—Guy Head’s portrait of a wounded Horatio Nelson, a combined knife and fork used by Nelson, and a letter written shortly after his injury bemoaning his poor handwriting. This trio of objects speaks to an important but underdiscussed aspect of the famed naval hero’s legacy. Nelson, whose right arm was amputated after it was shattered by a musket ball at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797, was disabled.¹

Historian Teresa Michals has written that “in the portraits and prints of the Napoleonic era, heroes cannot be amputees and amputees cannot be heroes—except for Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.”² Although Nelson is the subject of hundreds of biographies and academic articles, surprisingly few scholars have written about Nelson in the context of disability studies.

Michals has argued that the Guy Head portrait, seen above, was an atypical representation of Nelson because of its emphasis on his physical vulnerability. She suggests that it may actually have been intended to be viewed by his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton. Visual representations of Nelson’s “missing” arm provide glimpses of how he presented himself to (and was in turn perceived by) those in his public and private circles. Taking a closer look at the objects used by or belonging to Nelson, or “Nelson relics,” prompts us to further consider Nelson’s experiences as a disabled officer navigating the upper echelons of British society. In this blog, I examine two of these objects: the letter and the combined knife and fork.

In the letter above, written less than a week after the Battle of Tenerife, Nelson asks Admiral John Jervis to “excuse [his] scrawl” as it is his “first attempt” writing with his left hand. Penmanship was a carefully cultivated skill thought to reveal one’s social rank and personal character in eighteenth-century English society. In a humorous petition “to the nurses, parents & guardians of the kingdoms of Great Britain & Ireland,” dictated to his siblings William and Catharine in early 1798, Nelson complained that when it came to writing, drawing, fencing, and even shaking hands, the left hand had been “kept in a state of comparative ignorance, & barbarism.”³ While he re-learned how to produce neat writing with his non-dominant hand, Nelson—like many of his contemporaries—may have felt anxious about his “poor hand” and how it might reflect on his character.

Table manners were another learned behavior key to navigating polite society. The combined knife and fork shown above allowed Nelson to eat with one hand in polite company without having to switch between two different utensils, keeping up the appearance of bodily ease expected of gentlemen of his era. That said, navigating mealtimes with the unfamiliar utensil (which has what appears to be a sharp blade on one side) must have taken practice. It may even have been uncomfortable or painful. This early Nelson knife points to the discomfort and awkwardness a disabled person like Nelson was expected to conceal to appear “natural” in gentile society of the eighteenth century.

Putting these three objects in conversation, we begin to see the modified eating utensil not solely as an adaptive device but as a means of maintaining access to an upper-class sphere of society in which politeness was predicated upon having a right and a left hand with which to hold a knife and a fork. Similarly, Nelson’s letter to Admiral Jervis suggests a deeper concern about how his injury might impact not just his career in the navy but his perception by his social peers. Nelson’s duties as an officer did not require the use of two arms, whereas the more physically demanding tasks required of Able-Bodied or Ordinary seaman were more likely to be impacted by the amputation of a limb. So long as he could command men, Nelson was considered to be bodily “whole” for the purposes of his naval career. What was at risk, however, was his ability to fulfil social norms of politeness with his non-normative body.

This provocative trio of objects invites further exploration of the lived experiences of disabled sailors in the Royal Navy and their material worlds.

1. For more on Nelson’s life and naval career, see Roger Knight, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson (Basic Books, 2007); John Sugden, Nelson: The Sword of Albion (The Bodley Head, 2021); David Cannadine, ed., Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). ↩︎
2. Teresa Michals, “Invisible Amputation and Heroic Masculinity,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 44, no. 1 (2015): 17. See also Michals, Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admiral: Amputee Officers in Nelson’s Navy (University of Virginia Press, 2021). ↩︎
3. M. Eyre Matcham, The Nelsons of Burnham Thorpe (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1911), 149-50. ↩︎