“I was astonished at the coolness and undaunted bravery displayed by our gallant and veteran crew, when surrounded by five enemy’s ships.”
Officer on Bellerophon
Daybreak on October 21, 1805. The sun rose in a clear blue sky and promised a fine day. The wind was light and the sea almost calm as the masts of the combined French and Spanish fleets appeared over the horizon like “a great wood on our lee bow.” Majestically, the two fleets drew together. This was the last great naval engagement fought under sail and, unlike Copenhagen, it was fought in the open ocean. Many of the ships had been recently painted, the British in buff and black, the French in black and white, and the Spanish in the brighter red, white, and black. The white sails billowed out and the wooden spars were varnished and gleaming in the sunlight. The masts were rich with flags, multicoloured signal flags, the personal flags of the senior officers, and the huge national ensigns: the red and gold of Spain, the tricolour of France, and the Union Jack of Britain. Very few people ever got to see such a magnificent sight, and Franklin, with his love of the navy and things nautical, was impressed.
A fate that Franklin escaped. Nelson shot down in his moment of triumph on the quarterdeck of HMS Victory at Trafalgar, 1805.
But he was also awed. Many of the combined fleet’s ships were bigger, faster, and more heavily gunned than anything the British possessed. The biggest was the extraordinary Spanish flagship, Santissima Trinidad, considered by many to be the most beautiful ship afloat. With four gundecks, she towered over Nelson’s Victory or Franklin’s Bellerophon, and her 136 cannons had the potential to wreak terrible havoc amongst enemy sailors. However, the British had one advantage: they could fire their guns faster and more accurately than the enemy could. Thus they could kill more sailors and disable more ships, and, Nelson fervently hoped, win the coming battle. For all the beauty of the scene, there was brutal work to be done.
Nelson’s novel strategy was to break the combined fleet’s line. He hoped to do this by having two lines of his own sail at right angles to the enemy line. He led one line in the Victory, and his friend Collingwood led the other in the Royal Sovereign. The Bellerophon was sixth in Collingwood’s line. Franklins job that day was signals officer. He had to stand on the open deck with a telescope, read the flag signals from Nelson and Collingwood, and relay them to his own Captain Cooke. The last clear message he saw before the smoke of battle made his job difficult was Nelsons famous order, “England expects that every man will do his duty.”
Everything was ready on Bellerophon, “Billy Ruffian” as she was affectionately known by her crew. Her sailors had cleared the decks and thrown sand down to aid the footing of the barefoot gunners and absorb the blood of the dead and wounded. Men wrapped scarves around their heads to protect their ears from the deafening noise of the cannon, and they drew up wills. Each man fortified his spirits with a half pint of rum. Everyone was scared, but few let it show. Some sailors danced a hornpipe. The gunners primed their cannons and chalked, “Bellerophon, Death or Glory” on the barrels.
The battle began as the first shots were fired at the Royal Sovereign around noon. Half an hour later, the Bellerophon broke through the enemy line, exchanging cannon shot with the Bahama and the Montanes. Hauling around, she closed with the French ship L’Aigle, and the rigging of the two became entangled. The battle raged between the two ships. The French tried to board but were driven off. The Bellerophon almost blew up when a grenade, thrown through one of the gun ports, exploded in the corridor outside the powder magazine. Fortunately, the explosion blew the magazine door closed and prevented destruction. French soldiers packed L’Aigle’s rigging and raked Bellerophon’s open decks with musket shot. The Bahama returned to pour more cannon fire into the British ship. Others joined in, and at one point, the Bellerophon, with her main and mizzen masts gone, was fighting five enemy ships at once.
Through all this, Franklin was busy. He could not see any signals to relay, but one of his other duties was to make sure the main flag was kept flying. To lower it meant surrender. Twice the flag came down from enemy fire, and twice Franklin raised it.
The French musket fire made the open decks a deadly chaos. Captain Cooke died from a musket shot as he was reloading his pistols. One particular sniper in the French rigging was making life on the deck difficult. Franklin was talking with a friend, midshipman Simmons, when they saw a sailor wounded by the sniper. Simmons moved to help, but he had only gone a few steps when he shuddered, turned back to Franklin, and tried to speak. Then he collapsed on the deck, shot through the head. Franklin and a sergeant of Marines went to help the wounded sailor. As they carried him below, he was hit again and killed. “He’ll have you next,” Franklin told the sergeant. Grabbing a musket, the sergeant went below to try to get a sight on the sniper.
Franklin scanned the enemy rigging and spotted the sniper, who was aiming directly at him. He jumped behind the mast, and the musket ball intended for him embedded itself in the deck nearby. Franklin peered out to see the sniper fall from the rigging into the sea. The sergeant returned. “I killed him at the seventh shot,” the man proclaimed proudly.
So badly damaged that they could barely continue to fight, the two ships drifted apart. L’Aigle was captured by another British ship and Bellerophon claimed the severely damage El Monarca as a prize.
The Battle of Trafalgar ended at almost six in the evening with a spectacular explosion like the one that had nearly happened earlier on Bellerophon when the grenade blew up near the powder magazine. Fire, burning down through the decks of the French ship Achille, reached its powder magazine. “In a moment,” one observer wrote, “the hull burst into a cloud of smoke and fire. A column of vivid flame shot up to an enormous height in the atmosphere and terminated by expanding into an immense globe, representing, for a few seconds, a prodigious tree in flames, speckled with many dark spots, which the pieces of timber and bodies of men occasioned while they were suspended in the clouds.”
The battle was over. The British fleet was severely damaged, but the French and Spanish were destroyed. Nelson’s imaginative strategy had worked, but at a cost. Like Cooke on the Bellerophon, Nelson had been found by a sniper. A musket ball had entered his shoulder and lodged near his spine. He lived long enough to learn that the battle was won. His body was preserved in a cask of rum for the three-week journey back to England, where, amidst vast outpourings of national grief, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The Bellerophon lost her Captain, Master, and twenty-six crew dead. One hundred and twenty-seven men were wounded. Franklin was lucky. Out of the forty-seven men on the exposed quarterdeck, he was one of only seven neither killed nor wounded. In the official report of the battle, he was singled out for displaying “very conspicuous zeal and ability.” However, there was a price to pay. The noise of battle left Franklin slightly deaf for the rest of his life.
Franklin took great pride in his navy experiences. Twenty years after Trafalgar, he saw the Bellerophon’s scarred battle flag preserved in a church in England. “You can well conceive the delight it afforded to me,” he wrote, “especially as the preservation of it in the hour of battle was one of the particular parts of my duty as signals officer on that occasion.”
John Franklin’s involvement in the Battle of Trafalgar provides one of those strange coincidences that populate the darker corners of history books. Two threads of Canadian history crossed off the coast of Spain that day. One of the ships with which the Bellerophon exchanged fire was the Bahama. The captain of the Bahama, a rising star in the Spanish Navy, was less lucky than Franklin. After he disengaged Bellerophon, he was attacked by another ship, the Colossus. Before he could surrender his crippled ship, he was decapitated by a cannonball. That Spanish captain was Dionisio Alcala Galiano, who, with Malaspina, had mapped much of Canada’s west coast in 1792 in his ship the Sutil. Among the few remaining Spanish names scattered through the Gulf Islands off Victoria, there is a Dionisio Point, Mount Sutil, and Galiano Island. It is slightly bizarre that two significant figures in Canadian exploration unknowingly, yet busily, tried to kill each other in one of the most famous naval battles of all time.
After Trafalgar, Franklin returned briefly to Britain while his ship was repaired. Then, like most of the rest of the fleet, the Bellerophon spent a year and a half cruising to make sure Britain’s naval dominance remained and that her trade could be protected. In 1807, Franklin transferred to the Bedford as master’s mate, but was soon promoted to acting lieutenant. His role as lieutenant was confirmed on February 11, 1808 as he sailed with the fleet to escort the deposed Portuguese royal family to Brazil.
Franklin did not like the Portuguese, and, in keeping with the outspoken nature of his times, had no qualms about saying so. He called them, “the most ungrateful inhabitants of the earth, for whom it is impossible to feel the slightest esteem or respect.” With no apparent sense of irony, he went on to bemoan their “bigotry.”
On one occasion at Madeira, Franklin went ashore to collect two deserters from the Bedford who were being held by a Portuguese sergeant. The serious, religious young Franklin was not impressed to find the sergeant drunk and using the prisoners as free labourers to thatch his own home. In order to take charge of the prisoners, Franklin had to argue long and hard with the increasingly belligerent man. The man uttered violent threats and, as Franklin euphemistically recalled later, expressed himself, “with such gestures as greatly to irritate my feelings.” But Franklin could apparently keep his temper even under extreme provocation, and persistence paid off. He returned to the ship with the deserters, and the sergeant was left with holes in his thatch.
Franklin disliked Brazil too. He found it dirty, unhealthy, and overcrowded. This was a difficult time for Franklin. His father had made some poor financial decisions and his brother, Thomas Adam, was in the middle of his financial disaster. The family was in dire economic straits and the young Franklin could expect no money from home. For an ambitious officer trying to make good on his inadequate salary, this made life very difficult.
Things did not improve on Franklin’s return to Britain in August, 1810. Just three months later, his mother died at the age of fifty-nine. There followed two years of tedious, depressing work blockading the remnants of the French fleet at Flushing and Texel. Despite the horrific carnage he had seen at Copenhagen and Trafalgar, Franklin was eager for the French to come out and fight. “Let us hope for the best and wait with patience,” he wrote in a letter home. His patience ran out in 1812 and he applied for a transfer to see “the varieties of the service.” His request was denied.
The years 1813 and 1814 provided some variety with cruises to the West Indies to escort merchant convoys. The second cruise supplied more variety than Franklin bargained for when the Bedford was ordered on to New Orleans, where a British force was gathering to attack the city.
By late 1814, the War of 1812 was drawing to its conclusion. The attack on New Orleans was the last futile act in this fruitless war. The attack was carried out because the British Army wished to deny the Americans the storehouse of the city and because the British Navy was hungry for glory and prize money. It was futile because, two weeks before the attack began, the participants had signed a peace treaty and word of this was on its way across the Atlantic. The two thousand British soldiers who were killed or wounded in the hopeless frontal assault on the city suffered for nothing.
The navy’s role consisted of securing Lake Borgne for the British so that they could approach the city itself. In forty-five rowing boats, Franklin and 1000 others attacked the five American gunboats on the lake. After a brief but violent battle, the American boats were captured. But the British losses were disproportionately high, seventeen killed, and seventy-seven, including Franklin himself, wounded. Franklin was awarded a medal for his role in the attack and Mentioned in Dispatches. His wound could not have been that bad since he was soon back in action, supervising the digging of a canal to enable the troops to approach the city.
After the disastrous attack, the Bedford returned to Britain, where she arrived on May 30, 1815. If Franklin was still looking for adventures against the French, he was disappointed. In June, Wellington finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and the Napoleonic Wars ended. Franklin would have to seek adventure elsewhere.