October 21st 1805
11.30 am to 12 midday
Distance between fleets: 2 miles—1 mile
Victory’s heading and speed: 101° at 3 knots
Love: to regard with passionate affection; to regard with the affection of a friend.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755
Three ships behind the Victory, just astern of Fremantle in the Neptune, was the Leviathan, the ship-of-the-line which had shepherded Coleridge’s convoy to Malta the year before. The ship was ready for battle. Hammocks had been stowed in the netting alongside the upper decks, soft bulwarks to absorb musket balls. Other nets had been spread above the deck and poop to catch falling debris. Further anti-boarding nets had been rigged up. Cabins had been dismantled to give a clear run from stem to stern on the gundecks. Furniture had been stowed far below in the hold, thrown overboard or hauled up into the rigging. Animals were usually slaughtered, sent down to the hold, or in a crisis also thrown into the sea. Nelson had at times on a chase in the Mediterranean pushed bullocks overboard to lighten the ship and to clear them out of the way. This morning off Cape Trafalgar, Leviathan’s goat was explicitly saved from any such fate by her captain, 39-year-old Henry Bayntun.
He too brought a version of England to the battle. Bayntun was an immensely experienced officer, who had spent most of his life since he was in his early teens at sea in the West Indies, a career full of danger and aggression. He is a forgotten figure now but Nelson knew him and trusted him; they had been watching the Toulon fleet for many months together (British sailors called it ‘Too-Long’) and in pursuit of Villeneuve’s fleet in the summer of 1805 they had crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic together. Nelson had defended him against some aspersions from the Admiralty, calling him an ‘excellent officer’ and ‘extremely correct and proper’.
It would be easy enough to consider him, from these facts alone, as little but a hardened warrior. His personal papers are now preserved among the Bedfordshire County Records and from them a subtler picture emerges. They include his annotated copy of A Treatise on Practical Navigation and Seamanship by William Nichelson, published in 1792. Nichelson was Master Attendant at Portsmouth and from time to time Bayntun has written ‘Note!’ in the margins of this standard work. The emphasis of what Bayntun—the son of the Consul-General at Algiers—marked was consistently towards the need for an understanding of the general shared humanity on board a warship. Order was necessary; without order the great machine would not work; but subject to that order, all were men and all should be treated as human beings. ‘There is a sort of doctrine,’ Nichelson had written,
which I hope will never gain credit in the service, and which cannot be too much discountenanced or reprobated, which is, that it is possible to be a good Officer without being a good Seaman, which I positively deny, it being a flat contradiction of reason and common sense; I believe it to be generally favoured by those Officers who came too late into the service to be initiated into a Seaman’s duty; wishing at once to become officers, they were perhaps placed to command, instead of being placed in the tops, or other parts of the ship to be taught a sailor’s duty.
Bayntun drew asterisks in the margins next to this passage. It is a measure, for all the distinctions of rank, of the communality in the British man-of-war. The form of organic order on which such a ship relies is in fact dependent on recognising that communality:
There is a confidence also which the men have in their commander; when they find he is a seaman, the duty is carried on with a good will and a steady chearfulness because they know he is a competent judge of all that can be expected in the performance of their duty.
Only when that sharedness is absent does the system disintegrate. It is not that sailors are the usual run of men. They are not like soldiers, ‘since any able bodied landsman will make a soldier, a plowman taken from the plough today, in two or three months may be made a good soldier.’ But a seaman ‘should be understood to be quite different from all other classes of men, he does not spring up like a Mushroom, it requires many years to make him a seaman, with fatigue both of body and mind.’
That is why naval officers needed to be seamen first and officers second: if an officer does not truly know the ways of a ship, he will be deceived and cheated at every turn. And if he doesn’t know what to expect, he will punish unfairly: ‘how often has it happened, that a whole set of top-men have been flogged because the top-gallant yards have not been got across so soon as other ships?’ Nichelson asked, and Bayntun took due note.
Of all the passages he marked, the most heavily starred was this, a sermon on the nature of shared danger, in which Nichelson rises to some rhetorical heights, emphasising the need for the commander to be a man like other men, and for a single social fabric to cover all parts and all manner of men within the ship:
It is night time, or it is foggy or very hazy weather, that you cannot see the ship’s length, which is as bad as if it were night time; under those circumstances the mariner’s art, skill and experience are put to the trial, he is loaded with care and anxiety, but this is the time to shew himself a man of experience and true knowledge of his profession, as a Seaman and an Officer, to conduct and govern a ship or ships in such times as those; It is not hats and periwigs, powdered hair or silk stockings, fribbles or beaux, that are equal to the task required to be performed at this time, it must be men with heads and brains, the Seaman and the Officer, that must support the man at all times.
These are some of the ideas deep in the pre-conceptions of those on board the British fleet at Trafalgar. It is, for all the severity of its corporal discipline and the essential violence of its methods, a humane world and Henry Bayntun, by the evidence of his own letters was a humane as well as an energetic, resourceful and, in Nelson’s word, ‘excellent’ man.
When appointed to the frigate Quebec in the West Indies in 1799, he was, as new captains are, constantly busy perfecting his ship: applying to swap his old-fashioned 6-pounders for the more powerful new man-smashing carronades; changing the way in which the Quebec was ballasted; requiring another officer of marines; writing for a new supply of boys from England as well as a new 8-oared deal cutter instead of a heavy barge; replacing the gun carriages which were unserviceable; stowing the bread in ‘Iron Bound Casks’; commissioning new casks for the all-important scurvy-preventing lime juice; complaining of the lack of onions. He was, as he needed to be, zeal in action and his commanding officers saw the best in him.
From Robert Montague, Admiral
22 Oct 1801 in Port Royal
I desire to know who you wish to have for a Lieutenant and I also desire you will at all times ask, respecting your Officers appointments without any Ceremony as I am sure you will never wish to promote any person who is not Zealous in the public Service & I shall be happy at all times to evince by my Actions, how extremely high I hold your conduct in Estimation.
There is a little Boy named Thomas on board your Ship whose story excites my Compassion, I wish to see him immediately in order to give him a little Money, which perhaps may be acceptable: the Boat shall bring him back.
I am Sir Your Humble Servant Robert Montague, Admiral
When the admiral asked him to inspect the prison and hospital ships in Port Royal in Jamaica, Bayntun was appalled. There was nothing like enough awnings to protect the prisoners when on deck, nor windsails with which to direct breezes down into the foetid spaces below.
Bayntun was horrified to find that half of them were naked, that their guards beat them ‘with more brutality than is absolutely necessary’, that there were no safety ropes to prevent them falling down hatchways and that some of them were so ill fed and emaciated that they were on the point of death.
This is the voice of compassionate humanity confronted with a situation which had probably persisted ever since naval forces had taken prisoners. There were officers who thought ships could be run on kindness, a sin known in the 1805 navy by the significant term ‘fraternizing with the people’, as though the lower deck was a form of enemy. It was not to be tolerated and Bayntun was not one of them. He flogged when necessary, and at times more than the regulation maximum of 12 lashes to which a ship’s captain was limited. Nevertheless, when humanity was called for, he applied it:
Aug 28 1800
H.M.S.Quebec, Port Royal, Jamaica
Richard Wilton a Seaman of the said Ship was sentenced by a Court martial to receive one Hundred & Fifty Lashes for Desertion. He received Seventy Five Shortly after. But from Youth and Delicacy of Constitution could not at that time receive more. His character in other respects stands fair. Has been confined in Harbour and a prisoner at Large at Sea ever since.
And it is significant that among the papers discovered in the attic of his Bedfordshire house when his descendants sold it in the 1950s were both the log and muster book of the Leviathan for 1805. These were documents which by law Bayntun should have surrendered to the Admiralty at the end of a voyage but which he had kept. Out of pride? Or affection? It is impossible to say but they remain poignantly evocative documents.
Both are covered in stained and filthy sailcloth, made into a loose wrap almost like a fitted bag. The grey, coarse-woven covering is spotted with lamp oil and grease from food. Candle wax is dripped all over the cover on which the name of the ship is written in ink in huge Roman capitals.
The log itself is a coarse, working document, each page bearing not only the entries of the officers of the watch, each succeeding the other, but the signs of the weather, sea-splashed, sun-bleached. This morning—and the reality of the moment is never more insistent—there is an air of excitement, repetition and muddle to it:
Light airs and cloudy—at daylight observed the Enemy’s fleet to Leeward 35 sail; [corrected to 33] bore up, made sail pr sig [ie per signal] out first reef Topsails [ie the full depth of the topsails, the main driving sail of a man-of-war, shaken out to catch the wind] Cleared for action. At [illegible] hours [illegible] light airs and cloudy weather. All sail set standing down for the Enemy’s Fleet; they consisting of 35 [changed to 33] Sail of Line 5 Frigates and 2 Brigs Empd clearing ship for action. In company with 26 [changed to 27] sail of the Line 4 frigates and a schooner and Cutter.
One can all too easily imagine Admiral Sir Henry Bayntun, as he was to become, at home with his grandchildren in Bedfordshire, reading out to them from the Leviathan’s log of his day of glory. The muster book is its companion, bound and lettered in precisely the same way, the long list of the men with whom Henry Bayntun entered the cockpit of battle. The nominal complement of the ship, subjected to a weekly muster, is 640 people. But for the whole of 1805, there are never more than 515 men on board. The Leviathan, like every ship in every navy in the world, was undermanned. Some 180 of them were Irish, and of them 116 were listed as ‘landmen’, or men who had no previous experience of the sea and had been driven on board not by the press gang but by the wages, preferable to the pittance which an Ireland, already moving towards congestion, poverty and starvation, could afford. Apart from them, it was mixture of England, Scotland and a world community: Jamaica, Bermuda, Barbados, men from Bremen, from Norway, a John Ferris from ‘Russia’, men from Ostend, Rotterdam, Philadelphia, Boston, Maryland, New York, Marblehead, and a man called Domingo, an armourer’s mate, from ‘Bengall’.
Every officer, it was said in the best ships, knew the name of every man. This was no undifferentiated mass of humanity. Every man was allocated a precise task in handling the ship and another precise task in the station he was to take up for battle. Ships carried precise descriptions of each of member of the crew, useful in case of desertion but also in the daily management of a large concentrated body of young men. It may be a step too far to say that Henry Bayntun’s keeping of this precious muster book at home was a sign of love but it is at least a sign of attachment to his men.
That method of command was what his men expected. When a commanding officer fell short of that level of humanity, ships complained to the Admiralty. The company of HMS Terpsichore presented a petition in about 1800:
We are constantly on deck and beat and kicked about by Captain Mackellar and Mr Hall and the Boatswain now carries a stick cut of rawhide, plaited and served over with tarred twine, with which he cuts and slashes all he come near. We your petitioners have been seven years in this ship and always behaved ourselves as loyal and true-hearted subjects both by sea and land, under Admirals St Vincent and Nelson.
It was in part a question of simple dignity. The men of HMS Centaur, lying in Plymouth harbour, complained in 1812:
We the humble petitioners, the crew of His majesty’s ship the Centaur beg leave to inform you of doleful complaints. The first act of White’s cruelty was break up the hogsty and suffer the swine to range the main deck to the annoyance of the crew…
In exposing the private parts of a man’s body to public view and flogging on the posterior instead of the back; in terming damned useless trash and degrading us beneath brutes.
We therefore beseech you to extend your lenity to us and disperse us throughout the navy, The divine blessing will be on you for it.
Of course, one can’t be too dewy-eyed about this. The degree of punishment, compulsion, anger and maltreatment of men on board the Trafalgar fleet would be considered barbaric today. In the days before the battle, in ship after ship, punishments had been given. On Victory, according to the log kept by the master, Thomas Atkinson, on the 5th of October 6 men had been given 36 lashes each for drunkenness; on the 8th another 7, the same punishment for the same crime; on the 19th another 10, again the same number of lashes for the same crime. In the battle, the flagship would suffer some terrible casualties: 54 killed, 25 dangerously wounded, 12 badly wounded and 42 slightly wounded—one in six men killed or hurt by enemy fire. But in the aftermath of battle, there was no let-up. The habits of punishment continued. On 29 October, barely a week after the guns had ceased firing, and after the most dreadful storm that many of the sailors had ever encountered, Atkinson’s log would record:
Steering for Gibraltar. Fresh breezes and Cloudy. Out 1st Reef Topsails. Departed this life Mr Palmer Midn [one of the Trafalgar wounded]. Punished Jno Matthews, Richd Collins, Wm Stanford, Jno Mallard [or Walland], Chas Waters & Michl Griffiths Seamen with 36 lashes each for Contempt & Disobedience of Orders.
There could be no sentimentality about this. The destruction of the French and Spanish Fleets could not mean the end of imposed discipline.
Thomas Hardy, Nelson’s beloved captain, was more severe than most in the discipline he imposed on his crew. In the course of 1804 on the Mediterranean station, according to the evidence of Victory’s log, some 380 dozen lashes had been meted out to the men who made the flagship work, about 4,500 lashes in all. Drunkenness was by far the commonest offence, but all crimes that were punished with the lash could be classified as threats to order. Contempt, disobedience, insolence, neglect of duty and sleeping at one’s post were all the offences of people who were not fulfilling their place in the regulated structure on which the fleet relied. Only five instances of theft—a crime not against the ship but against fellow members of the crew—are recorded against over 150 acts of insubordination. For very exceptional offences, including desertion, use of mutinous language or buggery, punishments of several hundreds of lashes would be given.
To some at the time it seemed barbaric, and there exists a rare description of what it was like to be beaten in this way:
I felt an astounding sensation between the shoulders under my neck, which went to my toe-nails in one direction and my finger-nails in another, and stung me to the heart as if a knife had gone through my body…He came on a second time a few inches lower, and then I thought the former stroke sweet and agreeable compared with that one. I felt my flesh quiver in every nerve from the scalp of my head to my toe-nails. The time between each stroke seemed so long as to be agonizing, and yet the next came too soon…What with the blood from my tongue and my lips which I had also bitten, and the blood from my lungs or some other internal part ruptured by the writhing agony, I was almost choked and became almost black in the face.
Sickening as that is, and no doubt reflective of one reality, it nevertheless sounds like propaganda. Seamen in 1805 did not write ‘What with the blood from my tongue…’ nor would they have called a heart-rending pain in their gut ‘some other internal part ruptured by the writhing agony’ Neither of those expressions are the authentic voice of the lower deck. When you look harder, at genuinely contemporary documents, something different emerges: both a more phlegmatic attitude to suffering and an extraordinary sense that the revolution in feelings which had overtaken the gentry in the 18th century had yet to penetrate the social levels below them. Just as in Jane Austen’s novels members of the working class do not exist in the same exquisite universe of feelings inhabited by their social betters, there is a sense on board the Nelsonian ship-of-the-line that ordinary seamen, a little like slaves or farmed animals, were somehow beneath the level at which consideration for their feelings was relevant.
The Rev. Edward Mangin, a temporary and admittedly disenchanted Irish chaplain on HMS Gloucester, blockading the Dutch in the uncomfortable broken, shallow waters of the North Sea in 1812, considered the world of a fighting fleet a place where ‘every object [was] at variance with the sensibilities of a rational and enlightened mind’, full of ‘preparations the most complex and ingenious for the purposes of plundering and murdering [one’s] fellow creatures.’ Each man-of-war, Mangin thought, was nothing but ‘a prison, within whose narrow limits were to be found Constraint, Disease, Ignorance, Insensibility, Tyranny, Sameness, Dirt and Foul air: and in addition, the dangers of Ocean, Fire, Mutiny, Pestilence, Battle and Exile.’
Mangin only lasted three months in the navy but it was an educative time. ‘Just before we sailed,’ he wrote in his journal,
occurred one of those accidents, which though shocking to me, made little or no impression on my ship-mates, and was not talked of five minutes after it happened. A seaman, employed at the moment, with all the energy and fearless activity peculiar to this class of people, fell from the mainyard of the Stirling Castle, 74, lying close to us: he struck, as he dropped, against the main-chains, and was probably killed, for he instantly went down and disappeared.
If it had been an officer or a gentleman to whom this had happened, it is inconceivable that the ship’s company would have treated it as ‘one of those things’. Later, at sea, Mangin was even more forcibly struck by the emotional and conceptual gap between quarter—and lower decks. A seaman on board the Gloucester had been fishing for mackerel when somehow he had fallen overboard. A boat was launched after him as he struggled in the water far behind. Just as his rescuers arrived, he sank, his waterlogged coat dragging him down. He was within seconds of death and only saved by the quick-wittedness of one of the boat crew grabbing a boat hook and hooking it under his clothes. He was brought back on board, restored by the doctors and, to Mangin’s amazement, the next day was on duty as usual.
This is May 1812 and the man—significantly nameless in the story; Mangin only names officers—had been through one of the central liminal experiences by which the cultivated classes of Europe were then entranced. He had seen death; he had been within death’s grasp; he had lived through a moment of revelatory, Gothic intensity and yet he shrugs it off like a dog that has been for a plunge in a river. Mangin is puzzled. The incident
admits of a question whether bravery in men of the lower classes of society should not rather be termed insensibility: or is it that they have the sensibility of the enlightened, but want expression? The man above mentioned owed his safety to his resolution;…yet, it was perfectly impossible to discover that he was in the smallest degree perplexed by the prospect of death, or exhilarated by his preservation.
For the governing classes, the men they subjected to such brutal discipline, to whom strong alcohol and women shipped over in bumboats when in port was a regrettable and in part hideous necessity, seem to have been of a different kind, for whom the ‘sensibility of the enlightened’ was as alien as loyalty to King George would be to a Frenchman. This sense of a conceptual class division was not confined to the navy. It was generally accepted that men who could not be considered gentlemen were, at least in a political and social sense, of a different kind to those whose concern was order, government, rationality and business. Even John Wilkes, making his radical case, carefully delineates the boundaries of the political:
The people (I do not mean the illiterate rabble, who have neither capacity for judging of matters of government, nor property to be concerned for) are the fountain of authority. What they order is right, what they prohibit is wrong. Because the public business is their business.
The illiterate rabble were not to have a vote because they could not understand what they were voting on or for. Enlightened captains and flag officers attended with detailed and constant care to the wellbeing of their men, both physical and mental, and the crew of a man-of-war were often referred to simply as ‘the people’ or by the captain as ‘my people’ but this term represented concern for the effective and profitable working of a complex organisation, much as a farmer would be interested in the health of his livestock. In some critical sense, these people were not considered people in the same way that the people who walked the quarterdeck were people. Love and honour operated down to a certain social level; below that it was a question of discipline and obedience, lubricated with drink and occasionally interrupted by sex and war.
When, in ‘the complex and wonderful machine of which I was an inhabitant’ Mangin found that, for some obscure reason, a gentleman was living on the lower deck, it was as if the natural order had been turned upside down. He discovered one seaman on board the Gloucester, called Hickey, who
spoke French fluently, had the manners and address of a gentleman, fenced well, drew with taste, was a good mathematician and arithmetician, wrote a beautiful hand, conversed with a very happy choice of expression, quoted various authors, poets, philosophers and orators; criticised with judgment and novelty of feeling, statuary, architecture and painting—and played the violin finely: he besides impressed every one with respect, by his air of genteel and humble melancholy.
The officers of the Gloucester had a total of 500 books on board, which was all very well. But to find a Hickey slinging his hammock between the 32-pounders on the gundecks with between five and six hundred other men, where ‘the ports being necessarily closed from evening to morning, the heat, in this cavern of only 6 feet high, and so entirely filled with human bodies, was overpowering’, that was simply disturbing.
Of course, this gulf between the classes on board was at least in part, as Mangin guessed, a question of language. They ‘wanted expression’. Within a few decades, the English gentleman would become identified with a hopeless stiffness and lack of emotional vocabulary. The working man, for figures like Marx, Ruskin and Morris, became the source of a kind of emotional authenticity which the gentleman lacked. In 1805, the position was precisely reversed. Nothing was more fluent than the affective language of the 1805 officer. It was the seamen who struggled to express their love and affection. When Tom Flynn, coxswain of the Gloucester’s first cutter, died on 29 July 1812, he had been lying for days in his cot in the ship’s hospital, ‘mad, pale as ashes, and convulsed with dying spasms. Four or five of his messmates stood about him, holding lanthorns to his face, dropping silent tears on him, or in the most heart-rending accents calling him “Poor Tom” and “honest messmate”!’
When men from the lower deck needed to express feelings of a more sustained or elaborate kind, they reached with great difficulty, often in ways that remain profoundly moving two centuries later, for the language of gentility. A letter survives in the archives of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, addressed to ‘Mr George Hancock. Worksop. Nottinghamshire’. It was written on board Victory, by John Vincent, a 30-year-old Londoner, who was a quarter gunner on the flagship, He was writing to the father of a friend of his who had died in an accident during the long blockade off Toulon. It is worth quoting in full, as evidence from the other side, of precisely the gap between officers and men which Edward Mangin had seen. In every line one can make out the careful, sombre attempt to address the grief and concern which friend and father shared.
H.M.S. Victory
July 24 1805
Mr Hancock
I have recd the Letter directed to your son, dated Janry 1st [1805] and as a Messmate of your son’s, think myself in duty bound to inform you of your son’s unhappy and sudden Death, tho’ at present being unknown to you, as a Parent, I feel a Parent’s tenderness and affection, it certainly is a tender point to disclose, and will cause a tender and mutual sensation to commiserate his unhappy and untimely end, to you his Parents, his Brothers, Sisters, and acquaintances. On or about the 24th of November last, as we were cruising off Toulon, and at the time little or no Wind, the Day of the Month and time were taken down by me, but by some accident have lost the Memorandum, but hopeing this will reach you safe as a means of Giving you Satisfaction, I specify the time and place, as near as possible my recollection will allow me, tho’ fully convinced this unhappy News will cause a grief not easy to be describ’d but by those persons, who experience so close and tender a tie in Nature, as the Agitation of Mind descri’d from a parent to a Child. I hope you will not say I express myself in too fully, tho’ it is, a Candid and sincere manner, for I am a father, and possess’d of a Parent’s feeling and concern. About half after ten at Night the time before mention’d, having left him about ten minutes or a Quarter of an Hour, walking on the Larboard Gangway of the ship, but as I was Informed by Persons who were near him, that he being a young Man of a sprightly disposition, was moving himself about in different attitudes, unfortunately press’d the end of one of the rails, which are ship’d upon the Gangway, on purpose to hold the Ship’s company’s hammocks upright, I believe rather too hard, which upset with him, and not being able to save himself, he unfortunately fell overboard and was Drown’d, tho’ every Effort possible was made use of for to save him, but at the time of his falling overboard, he had a great Coat on, which I believe must have been a great annoyance to him, I am very sorry, Sir, that I am the channel of such unwelcome Intelligence, tho’ think myself in duty bound to Inform you, and if not too great an intrusion, should wish to be Informed of your receiving this Letter, which will be a great satisfaction to your Ever Obdt Servant
JOHN VINCENT
A winter night in the Mediterranean; the sailors wrapped up in their heavy greatcoats; some of them larking about on the gangways that crossed the waist of the ship from the quarterdeck to the forecastle, perhaps drunk, although Vincent couldn’t mention that; and then the sprightly boy going a step too far and disappearing into the dark. It happened in the course of the war tens of thousands of times. It has very roughly been reckoned that an average of about 5,000 men in the Royal Navy died every year: about 400 in enemy action or of their wounds; another 500 in shipwreck: about 2,600 from disease and almost 1,700 from accidents on board. In a war that lasted 22 years, that gives a figure of about 37,000 men who died from accidents on board. Ships were intensely dangerous places but only rarely can there have been a letter such as Vincent’s. More often the news would have come in a far colder fashion. This is a letter which the young Henry Bayntun wrote to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty from Jamaica in August 1800:
Gentlemen,
I beg leave to inform you of the Death of the persons named in the Margin late belonging to His Majesty’s Ship under my command who had allotted part of their wages for the maintenance of their families and I have to request you will stop the payment of the same in consequence.
George Cuttler
Lott. Boyce
That’s all: the money from the distant son or father stops coming one day. It is a commercial arrangement: the man is dead and so the navy no longer pays for his services. The stopping of the pay may well have been the only way in which the family of the dead man heard the news. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they will go on the poor relief and all they are left with is the knowledge that the body of their man has been dropped into the ocean, sewn into a hammock, shotted at each end with a 32lb ball.
On either side of the class division, a form of love operated. The British fleet was thick with it. Officers loved officers and men loved men. That closeness did not cross the divide between quarterdeck and lower deck. But without doubt, on the best ships, there was a sense of oneness in a ship’s company, a treasuring by the men of a commander they admired; and a nurturing by the commander of the men he relied on. Captains might transfer from one ship to another and take their entire ship’s company with them. Elderly midshipmen might look after young gentlemen volunteers, much as family retainers might have attended to them at home.
Certainly, this morning, there is an outpouring of love to those at home. On board HMS Mars, Captain George Duff was already a hero. He had run away to sea when he was nine, had been in 13 engagements before he was 16, and had been placed, on Collingwood’s recommendation, in command of the all-important inshore squadron watching the Combined Fleet in Cadiz. It was intended that the Mars would lead Collingwood’s lee column into battle. There was a heroic look to him: ‘a man of fine stature, strong and well made, above six feet in height, and had a manly, open, benevolent countenance,’ famous in the fleet as ‘an instructor, and father, to the numerous young men who were under his command.’ He had his eldest son, 13-year-old Norwich, with him on board the Mars as a volunteer and this morning he wrote to his wife, whom he had married fifteen years before, a desperately rushed, ink-blotched letter which was found among his papers when the battle was over.
Monday Morning 21st Oct.1805
My Dearest Sophia I have just time to tell you we are just going into action with the Combined, I hope and trust in God that we shall all behave as becomes us, and that I may yet have the happiness of taking my beloved wife and children in my arms. Norwich is quite well and happy I have however ordered him of the Qr Deck Yours ever and most truly Geo: Duff
The quarterdeck was the most dangerous part of the ship in battle, where officers stood desperately conspicuous and with the protection only of the men’s hammocks brought up from below and stowed in netting along the gunwale. The quarterdeck was the killing zone. Any father would send his son below hidden behind the thick oak bulwarks of the Mars.
And more famously Nelson was writing to Emma Hamilton with the emotionality and immediacy that marked all his letters to her, his love pouring without thought on to the page:
Victory Octr: 19th: 1805
Noon Cadiz ES.E 16 Leagues
My Dearest beloved Emma the dear friend of my bosom the Signal has been made that the Enemys Combined fleet are coming out of Port. We have very little Wind so that I have no hopes of seeing them before tomorrow May the God of Battles crown my endeavours with success at all events I will take care that my name shall ever be most dear to you and Horatia both of whom I love as much as my own life, and as my last writing before the battle will be to you so I hope in God that I shall live to finish my letter after the Battle May Heaven bless you prays your Nelson + Bronte
Nelson is not an aberrational figure. For him, as for his officers, love, longing, battle, glory, sacrifice, honour, risk, excitement and the terrifying beauty of the moment are all bound up in his words. Love and battle are two parts of the same thing. They seem, in Nelson’s heightened language, to be almost interchangeable. Love, in a sense, is what battle is for and the battle is where love becomes most clear. He envisages Emma and Horatia forever cherishing not himself but his ‘name’. Henry Blackwood also writes to his wife this morning about his ‘name’. Death hangs in the background; the foreground is filled with love and glory.
Love in the 18th century had been seen, essentially, as a social virtue, part of the politeness which distinguished the 18th century from the rough violence and extreme views of the century before. ‘Politeness’ for the enlightened Englishman did not carry its wooden, post-Romantic and post-revolutionary sense of constraint, inhibition and hypocrisy. The polite was the easy, the open, the courteous, the civilised and the loving. Well dressed and well behaved amicability allowed people of every degree and every condition to mix. The country had lost its martial front. The wearing of swords to public gatherings became unfashionable; towns had their medieval walls demolished and substituted with parks and avenues. This belief in courtesy and the efficacy of charm—at least within the gentlemanly class—was inherited by the best of the Nelsonian officers. It was a belief which despised the old naval tyrants, ‘the oppressive and tyrannical characters in the Navy,’ as Captain Anselm John Griffiths described them in his Observation on some Points of Seamanship, published in 1809. Griffiths went on:
The man who endeavours to carry all before him by mere dint of his authority and power would appear to me to know little indeed of human nature. Surely there can be no comparison between those who obey from fear and those who do it from inclination, or those who feel that necessary restraint alone is correctly laid on them.
The Royal Navy was, in part, a love structure, for two reasons. Love was one of the marks of a gentleman. ‘Amiability’ was one of the characteristics which distinguished an enlightened man. Even old Mr Austen advised his son Francis to treat the men of the lower decks with ‘a certain kind of love’ not because they deserved it but because that was what was expected of him. Love was one of the values for which Trafalgar was fought.
More than that, though, love worked as a tool of battle. It was the twin of courage. At the time of Trafalgar, Coleridge, attempting to remake his life after chronic catastrophes over love and drugs in England, had gone to Malta, where he was working as the secretary of the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. Ball had been one of Nelson’s band of brothers at the Nile. Now he was administering Malta like a philosopher-king. Coleridge, from his own position of half-broken, self-doubting despair, looked up to Ball as pure hero. From another naval officer in Malta, younger than Ball and just as much a hero-worshipper as Coleridge had become, Coleridge heard a story which seemed to encapsulate everything that mattered most about love and courage. Ball had been the lieutenant in command of a cutting-out expedition in the West Indies, in which a small British force, in open boats, attacked an enemy frigate. The young man who spoke to Coleridge had then been a very junior midshipman, a boy:
As we were rowing up to the vessel which we were to attack, amid a discharge of musketry, I was overpowered by fear, my knees trembled under me, and I seemed on the point of fainting away. Lieutenant Ball, who saw the condition I was in, placed himself close beside me, and still keeping his countenance directed towards the enemy, took hold of my hand, and pressing it in the most friendly manner, said in a low voice, ‘Courage my dear Boy! don’t be afraid of yourself! You will recover in a minute or so—I was just the same when I first went out in this way.’ Sir, added the officer to me, it was as if an Angel had put a new Soul into me. With the feeling that I was not yet dishonoured, the whole burthen of agony was removed; and from that moment I was as fearless and forward as the oldest of the boat crew, and on our return the Lieutenant spoke highly of me to our Captain.
That moment is the culmination of a culture. Nelson, famously, use to run up the ratlines alongside the junior midshipmen going aloft for the first time, encouraging them upwards, by the example of his ease and grace in the predicament they feared. But Alexander Ball adds even greater dignity to the act. He looks at the enemy not at the midshipman—a gesture which itself preserves the young boy’s honour. He holds and presses the midshipman’s hand, like a father and a friend. He understands, as a man educated in the knowledge of his own and others’ feelings, that it is not the enemy the boy fears, but himself. ‘Don’t be afraid of yourself! You will recover in a minute or so—I was just the same when I first went out in this way.’ This is the community of honour vivified by an act of loving care. It is one of the foundations of the British victory at Trafalgar: glory as an outgrowth of love.
Its absence from a ship or a fleet could be fatal, but the distinctions are fine and subtle here. The boundary between order and tyranny, between a hard, coherent regularity and a tight brutalism was in fact far more narrow, movable and vague than those terms might suggest. The possibility of abuse in the name of good order and professionalism was inherent in the system. There were certainly officers who behaved as tyrants on ships. Captain Robert Corbet of HMS Nereide was typical of those in whom the unbending moral test to which he was subjected destroyed his understanding of what a ship’s company might be. He bullied his men, repeatedly humiliating them in front of the rest of the ship’s company, had them beaten again and again, repeatedly forcing them to do the same task until it was done to his satisfaction, tyrannising the people he wanted to be part of a perfect fighting machine.
Transferred to HMS Africaine, his reputation going ahead of him, Corbet soon arrested a marine for insubordination. An anonymous death threat, in the form of a letter thrown on to the quarterdeck, was then sent to the captain. Corbet immediately armed his officers, confronted the crew and read out the letter to the company, telling them that ‘it was his fixed determination to be a great deal more severe than he had ever yet been.’ The marine was given eight dozen lashes and the ship’s purser wrote in his journal: ‘If the People had before this entertained any doubts of the Nerve & determined character of their Captain, they must now no doubt have been undeceived.’
Soon afterwards, when the Africaine had been horribly mauled by the French off Mauritius, leaving 163 of her 300 men dead and wounded, Corbet himself died of wounds, either shot by his own men—he had refused to surrender as the French destroyed his ship around him—or, it was said, killing himself by removing a tourniquet and bleeding to death, rather than submit to the humiliation of capture.
A high state of order, courage, devotion to duty, unremitting zeal, a sense of honour, a commitment to ferocious battle: why does Corbet not emerge a hero? So much of him—his daring, his extremeness, his ruthlessness, his courage—is like Nelson, and was perhaps modelled on Nelson, but there is nothing Nelsonian about him, because in Nelson, not uniquely, but all-importantly, there was a quality of grace and humanity, within which the necessarily violent aggression found a dignifying frame, and which inspired love in others. Without it, Nelson would have been a Robert Corbet and no one would have heard of him.
The entire network of love, honour, mutual reliance, selfbelief and sense of responsibility to an end greater than yourself lies behind the morning of Trafalgar. In his great cabin, already partly dismantled for battle, Nelson had written his famous Trafalgar prayer, in which he prayed for a ‘great and glorious Victory’ and after it ‘for humanity to be the predominant feature in the British fleet.’ He then turned to the codicil to his will, bequeathing both Emma and their daughter Horatia to the care of his country. Those were ‘the only favours I ask of my King and Country at this moment when I am going to fight their Battle. May God bless my King and Country, and all those who I hold dear. My relations it is needless to mention: they will of course be amply provided for.’
Those few words, at this intensely heightened moment, provide a map of Nelson’s and in some ways the naval mind. Nelson was an immensely easy writer, capable of transmitting a wide range of emotion, irony and bitterness to the page. The distance which opens up under the phrase ‘their Battle’ is no accident. Nor the astonishing coldness in the reference to his relations. These are the last sentences Nelson ever wrote and they describe a radically polarised world. In England, the Establishment of King and Country, which imposes on its servants duties it would never dream of undertaking itself, and a cluster of relations, parasitically demanding the crumbs that fell from the hero’s table; and here, off Cape Trafalgar, a different world, a fleet of friends, of co-partners in the realm of risk and glory, to which, by extension, the woman he loved and the daughter they shared, also belonged.
It was a gesture which embodied a profoundly Nelsonian combination of naivety, deep trust and high egotism. In retrospect it is inconceivable that an increasingly strait-laced British Establishment would look after either a scandalous mistress or her illegitimate child, however noble and glorious the lover and father might be.
That is the view of history and was certainly the view from London in 1805. From within the fleet, though, from the world of interconnected lives which the Royal Navy fostered, such a legacy was neither odd nor wrong. The trust by which it worked was founded on their sense of honour and on the habit of mutuality on which a ship relies. The social connections and practice of care within the navy, by which captains took on their young relations and the sons of their friends as midshipmen, might just as well be extended to the two people most loved and adored by their own adored admiral. In the heightened emotional atmosphere before the battle, the request that Britain should look after Horatia Nelson might have seemed little different from Captain Duff sending 13-year-old Norwich Duff away from the quarterdeck, Alexander Ball holding the midshipman’s hand, Henry Bayntun asking for the prisoners to be better treated in the Caribbean, from George Duff’s hurried and desperate long-distance love for his Sophia in Edinburgh or even from John Vincent’s letter to Mr Hancock in Nottinghamshire. Each of those instances was a symptom of sociability and of a naval civilisation which, if anything, went further in its mutual attachments than those Englishmen who stayed on shore and relied on the navy for their security.
From a distance of a good mile away, the first shot from the French and Spanish fleet, aimed high, flew over the flagship. Henry Blackwood recorded his last minutes with Nelson:
When Lord Nelson found the shot pass over the Victory, he desired Captain Prowse of the Sirius and myself, to go on board our Ships, and in our way to tell all the Captains of Line-of-Battle Ships, that he depended on their exertions; and that if, by the mode of attack prescribed, they found it impracticable to get into Action immediately, they might adopt whatever they thought best, provided it led them quickly and closely alongside an Enemy. He then again desired me to go away; and as we were standing on the front of the poop, I took his hand, and said, ‘I trust, my Lord, that on my return to the Victory, which will be as soon as possible, I shall find your Lordship well, and in possession of twenty prizes.’ On which he made this reply, ‘God bless you, Blackwood, I shall never speak to you again.’