7
HUMANITY
October 21st 1805
2.15 pm to 4.30 pm
Humanity: great tenderness of heart
EDMUND BURKE, An Appeal from the new to the old Whigs, 1791
As the Victory approached the allied line, she had already suffered 20 dead and 30 wounded. The dead had gone over the side, if only to prevent their blood making the workspace of battle unusable. The wounded were already clogging the surgeons’ tables in the cockpit. According to Nelson’s specific instructions, their knives were warmed. The coldness of the steel at the amputation of his arm in the Canaries was something he wanted no one else to suffer. The silence was over; the shrieking came up from below.
Even though, as usual, the crew had duplicated many of the lines in the running rigging, replacing some with chain rather than hempen rope, Victory’s top hamper was now in tatters. The studding sail booms on her foremast had all been shot away close to the yard-arms. The mizzen topmast had been toppled and hung over the poop deck. The foresail itself was hanging in strips. A shot had destroyed the wheel and the ship was now being steered by commands shouted down (perhaps through a speaking tube) to 40 men manning tiller ropes in the gun room below.
This wounding of ship and crew, before a single shot had been fired in response, was an entirely conscious part of Nelson’s plan. He knew that the spearpoints of the two British columns would take the most terrible battering from the enemy fleet. He had decided that the strongest ships in the squadron, the three-deckers, should lead those columns and that they should be captained by men he knew and trusted from the long campaigns in the Mediterranean over the previous five years. And he knew, equally well, that both he and Collingwood should be in the lead. That was the essence of the tactics at Trafalgar: a front-loading of fire-power, inspiration, exposure and damage. Thus equipped, the leading ships of the British attacking columns could apply overwhelming force to the centre and rear of the allied line. It was the equivalent of a heavily armoured thrust, strong enough to resist the cannonade with which it would be greeted on the way in, devastating when it arrived.
The battle would be won in its beginnings, which is why Nelson had to be at the front. He conceived Trafalgar, at its heart, not as a corporate action, of the fleet acting as a single disciplined body; but as an action in his image. That was its primitivism. Where he and Collingwood led, others must follow, not by attending to the orders which he would issue – for he would issue none – but by doing what he had shown them to do. It was the most elemental form of command: leadership by example; a throwback to the days of heroism, when warrior kings did not direct, but demonstrated by their own prowess how war was to be conducted. There was honour in exposure, but the honour was not futile. Honour – like zeal, order, daring, love and violence – was an instrument of battle. The heroism, of which those were the constituent elements, was in the service of one thing only: victory.
Sailing warships were in many ways delicate things. If topgallant masts and even topmasts and yards were not ‘struck’ or lowered in severe weather, they and their rigging would break. A line-of-battle ship was not made and manufactured in the shipyard as a finished object. It was in constant transformation, a continuous process of repair, attended to, battered by the sea and wind, endlessly nurtured by officers and crew. In a storm, fleets could not be held stiffly in position; they had to give before it, running with the wind, before returning to resume their stations after the stress was over. A ship was, in many ways, its habit of care. For Nelson, outstandingly among contemporary naval officers, that habit extended to the wellbeing of the men he commanded. The mountains of lemons ordered for the fleet, the onions at every meal, the standing as godfather to the children of the wounded, the recommending of positions for men he knew and trusted, the courtesy to the slightest, the punctilious delivery of notes and letters: humanity to one’s own crew, just like the nurturing of the ships themselves, was what in the end would annihilate the enemy.
That is the context in which to understand the approach of Victory to the Combined line. That ship, like those that followed, was one of the most carefully maintained objects in the world. Everything, for month after month, would have told the officers and crew of a ship to attend to its orderliness, to nurture its systems, to be careful.
Now, at this moment, all of that had become an irrelevance. As they approached the line, first aiming astern of the Santísima Trinidad, then aiming for a gap just astern of the French flagship, the Bucentaure, the French ship behind it, the Redoutable, began to close the gap. Hardy looked anxiously ahead and realised that the Victory could not pass through the allied line without ‘running on board’ or colliding with one of their ships. He asked Nelson what he should do:
His Lordship quickly replied, ‘I cannot help it: it does not signify which we run on board of. Go on board which you please: take your choice.’
Hardy is to decide. Damage and devastation were now the currency of victory, just as, a moment before, care and system had been the necessity. Prudence, so essential to the wellbeing of a fleet, was now to be abandoned. Choice did not signify. This was neither bravado nor bloodlust, but the application of a highly attuned mind to the essence of battle. It is a form of negative capability, a trans-rational sense of when interference and attentiveness, the giving and structuring of orders, becomes secondary. It is the point at which the preparedness of a system is so all-encompassing that the system no longer needs to be looked after. If a system is good enough, it must be abandoned to something far more wildly energetic, the thing that creates victory out of the destruction it wreaks.
‘Everything seemed,’ Collingwood wrote lovingly and loyally after the battle, ‘as if by enchantment, to prosper under his direction. But it was the effect of system, and nice combination, not of chance.’ That was true, and at least hinted at the whole truth. Collingwood could not stomach the common and received idea, which was everywhere in England, that Nelson was a magician, the conjuror of victory, that he achieved it by a kind of ‘spell’. But in the sense that in this battle Nelson relinquished pattern and rationality, there is an element of truth in the word ‘enchantment’. Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar would not have occurred unless he had allowed and encouraged free rein to the less conscious forces of devastating aggression, the desire to excel, the desire for prizes, the desire to kill and the desire to win. His potency as a commander rests in this very moment as Victory comes within a few yards of the stern of the Bucentaure. Here his method – you might say his art – flicks over from careful to careless, from control to anarchy, from commander to conjuror. His method bridged those contradictory qualities, embodying and practising a negative capability which did not need to choose between them.
Almost exactly two years before, in late October 1803, Coleridge in his notebook had asked himself the point of all his thought and work, and answered:
To support all old & venerable Truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the Reason spread Light over our Feelings, to make our Feelings diffuse vital warmth thro’ our Reason – these are my Objects – & these my Subjects.
That radical crossing of categories, and the deeply humane nature of the enterprise, pursued through extreme, difficult, self-destructive and often lonely conditions, is the quality that unites Nelson and Coleridge. For both, the method is radical, the purpose deeply conservative, concerned for ‘all old & venerable Truths’ in a world threatened with change and destruction. It is the zeitgeist speaking through them, joined in this most ardent moment in English consciousness.
As Collingwood wrote of Nelson after Trafalgar:
There is nothing like him left for gallantry and conduct in battle. It was not a foolish passion for fighting for he was the most gentle of all human creatures and often lamented the cruel necessity of it, but it was a principle of duty which all men owed their country in defence of her laws and liberty.
Those are deeply affectionate and understanding words, embracing the contradictions of the systematic-irrational, humane-violent, intolerant-generous, powerful-suffering hero whom he worshipped. As Victory’s bowsprit came across the stern of the Bucentaure, Collingwood would have seen nothing of it. He was already deep into the smoke and fire of his own battle a mile to the south. But he would have known what was about to happen.
The wind has dropped, the studding sails have been shot away, the others are like sieves or riddles, and Victory slows to the point of encounter. The slight bowing of the allied line, to north and south of her, allows both broadsides to be fired with advantage before she breaks through it. As the guns fire, it is as if the air is sucked out from between decks. Every apocalyptic vision the men have heard or dreamed of starts to become real.
The one was cloth’d in flames of fire,
The other cloth’d in iron wire,
The other cloth’d in tears and sighs
Dazzling bright before my eyes.
The whole ship, in its massive timbers, shudders with the reverberations of the 100 guns. Then the starboard bow of Victory collides with the Redoutable and Victory’s forecastle is astern of the Bucentaure. The French flagship is so close that if there were more of a wind the great French ensign hanging from the peak of her spanker, her aftmost sail, could have been snatched at by men on the deck of Victory. As it is, the Victory rolls in the swell coming under her and the main yard-arm on the port side just touches the vangs on the Frenchman’s gaff – the system of lines holding up the spar to which the spanker is bent. That close, intimate brushing of the enemy – with its strangely erotic undertones of initial, stroking seduction – is what Nelson had in mind. It is the Nelson Touch.
Then the necessary murder: on Victory’s forecastle, one on each side, is a pair of huge 68-pounder carronades. They are loaded with a single large calibre roundshot and a canister of 500 musket balls. The portside carronade is fired straight into the stern windows of the Bucentaure and its charge travels the length of the gundecks in the French flagship: a single avenging destroyer followed by its cloud of disciples. One by one, as they come to bear, the 50 guns of the Victory’s port broadside then fire, double-shotted, down the same open alleyway. The metal shot, each 6 ¼ inches wide, ricochet through the men and guns that lie in their way, a bowling arcade in which the bowls do their work on the nine-pin Frenchmen. Twenty of the great guns on Bucentaure, each weighing nearly three tons, are turned over and made useless. The condition of the people can scarcely be imagined. Afterwards, British officers saw the bodies lying on those gundecks, many of them strangely beheaded by the passing shot. What the Royal Sovereign had done to the Santa Ana, the Victory is now doing to her French counterpart. The dust from the Bucentaure’s smashed woodwork settles on the shoulders of Nelson and Hardy. Black smoke from the broadside rolls back into the gundecks on Victory where each gun has burning beside it a lantern to illuminate the darkness of battle. Hundreds of men on the Bucentaure had been killed or wounded in the two minutes Victory had taken to sail past her. They listened for the crash made by their shot ‘with characteristic avidity’.
In front of them now, and to the right, the French Neptune, 80 guns, opened fire on the Victory’s bow. Damage everywhere; splinters the size of pick-axe handles flying across the deck; the foremast ‘wounded’; the bowsprit hit and the yards carrying the spritsails that were hung from it shot away. The weak structure at the bows of the ship takes a series of roundshot, each one slicing into the smoke-filled spaces between decks. These are the moments in which the Victory has more men killed than at any other. Their bodies are thrown over and, as Turner would later quite accurately paint it, the sea becomes coloured with their blood, the Atlantic turned murky with its stain. In other ships, the blood is seen running from the scuppers, down the topsides, streaking the paintwork.
Hardy, meanwhile, ordered Victory to starboard, towards the Redoutable. Instructions are shouted down to the men at the tiller ropes, and the flagship begins her slow turn around the bow of the Redoutable. A broadside was poured into her as Victory crossed her bows. The Redoutable fired back, took some shots at the British Téméraire which had followed Victory into battle, and then, to the consternation of the British, closed most of her lower deck gunports, presenting an almost blank, unarmed face to the enemy. Jean-Jacques Lucas, her tiny, fierce captain, had decided to confront the British not with the great guns but with musketry. The ports were closed to prevent the British boarding through them. Within a minute or two, the Victory and the Redoutable lay alongside each other. The British gunners kept at their work, unable to run the guns out through their ports as the hull of the Redoutable walled them in. They fired from within the Victory’s own decks, where the black smoke made nothing visible. Where they could, they fired through those of the Redoutable’s ports that were open, destroying Frenchmen down the length of a dining-room table. If not for one peculiar bit of luck, the effect of Victory’s broadsides might, through sheer Newtonian physics, have driven the two ships apart. By chance, though, Victory’s starboard fore topmast studding sail boom iron – the metal fixing holding the boom on to which the fair-weather sail to starboard of Victory’s topsail was bent – caught in the side of the Redoutable’s fore-topsail. It was enough, in the very light airs, to hold the ships together and, together with the grappling hooks which the Redoutable threw across to Victory, that small piece of forged iron created the conditions in which Nelson died.
The killing continued. The carronade on the starboard side of the Victory’s forecastle had not been fired. Now it surveyed, with its terrifying mouth, the open upper deck of the Redoutable. The Victory’s boatswain, using the carronade, loaded with canisters of musket balls and hugely heavy single shots, swept the gangways clean of living Frenchmen. Life was not sustainable there.
Meanwhile, of course, Captain Lucas of the Redoutable had his response. The guns on his maindeck were now being fired into the Victory. Muskets were being shot through some of their gunports into the gunports of the enemy, obliterating the Englishmen working at the great guns only a few feet away. But Lucas had also placed men with muskets in the ‘tops’ – solid wooden platforms on each of the three masts, set some 30 feet above the deck. They were substantial structures: a musket ball fired from below would not penetrate them and so musketmen in the tops could shield themselves from British fire with the timbers on which they stood. In the main and fore tops, small brass mortars called ‘cohorns’, filled with odds and ends of man-killing metal called ‘langridge’ – a piece of which had struck Nelson on the forehead during the Battle of the Nile, exposing a section of skull one inch wide and three inches long – were sweeping Victory’s forecastle.
It was a killing game, and, because of the nature of the projectiles, bound to be a long one. Explosive shells had been in use in naval warfare since the 17th century; Colonel William Congreve, working at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, had developed explosive rockets; and there were explosive mines and explosive grenades. Nevertheless, established naval opinion was for the moment largely against them. The Redoutable was equipped with grenades, which men in the tops and the rigging threw down on to the the British decks and through the hatchways. Despite that, the central armament of the fleet was inert metal, in the form of the musket ball, the canister, grape shot or round-shot. None could, in itself and singly, destroy or disable a ship, as an explosive round would have done. Damage could only be cumulative, and victory in pre-explosive battle was achieved either by the imposition of a huge concentration of fire-power in a short time in a confined space; or, between more equally matched opponents, in a simple slugging match. The ships were very nearly unsinkable, unless their magazines caught fire and they exploded. Ships could continue to float and fight even when their hulls and rigging were largely destroyed. A battle was won only if so much damage was inflicted on the enemy’s people that they could no longer fire back.
Speed of repeat firing became the key. As in draughts, the more you were winning, the more you were likely to win. It was nearly impossible to claw your way back from a losing position. It was a question, as in business, of trends. A small advantage, slowly opening, would in the end bring you victory. If one set of gun crews could fire faster than the other; or if they could begin, as Victory had, with a devastating initial attack, it was difficult for the enemy to catch up. Once behind, the gun crews – the heaviest guns needed 14 men each – would be broken apart by the incoming cannonades. Every time they attempted to reorganise, the next broadside would again destroy them. It was a task for Sisyphus.
British gun-training insisted that every man in each gun crew should be able to perform every task in the elaborate, dangerous heavyweight ballet of loading, firing, cleaning and reloading a gun. That was more rarely the case among the French and Spanish, but at least the defensive thickness of the hulls, and the presence behind them of officers who would shoot them if they deserted their posts, meant that losing crews did not instantly surrender. A certain amount of time was needed before a decision would emerge. That moment – marked by the silence of the guns – was when the beaten ship should strike her flag. This was not maniacal berserker battle: to continue with slaughter when it had become obvious there would be no other outcome, was a mark of inhumanity, not courage. Nearly always there was a precise moment at which the battle was turned from on to off. Until that moment the duty was to reply to their guns with yours. After fighting a Frenchman to a standstill at the Glorious First of June in 1794, and having completely silenced her, the Honourable Thomas Pakenham, younger son of the Earl of Longford, famously hailed her through a speaking trumpet with a string of oaths:
‘–, –, you! Have you surrendered?’ Back came a faint reply, ‘Non, Monsieur.’ Then he thundered, aggrieved to the very soul, ‘Why the – don’t you go on firing?’
These technological boundaries established the moral terms of battle. You could not dash in and out, to deliver a killer punch and then retire. If you were to win you had, in the word they used, to ‘engage’. You had to stay there in close proximity to their killing power for a certain length of time until you had overcome them or they had overcome you. If you wanted to shorten this time, and kill more of them more quickly than your great guns were achieving, you could board an enemy, and kill them in hand-to-hand fighting, which if successful could bring an instant result. That was a tactical variation. The essence remained the same: kill enough of the enemy for them to surrender. You could then take their ship as a prize, which would make you rich.
The effect of this was to create a battle environment in which the humanity of the combatants – their reality as people – was the guiding principle at work. A non-explosive technology which was effective only at short range; and an ideology of honour, which insisted on the exposure of the commander to the greatest danger: that combination made battle intimate, and ensured that the faces of the enemy were visible. And that in turn shaped the way in which the battle was conceived, described and remembered.
This is both the most important and the most unexpected aspect of Trafalgar. Nowhere does this fleet’s 18th-century inheritance become more obvious. The preceding hundred years had seen a revolution in the English sense of humanity. The 17th century had understood man essentially in relationship to God. The 19th century would agonise over the fate of his individual self. The 18th century in England saw man’s existence neither in those abject metaphysical terms nor in the lonely isolation of the romantic soul but as essentially social, engaged with others, part of a society which gave his life meaning. God himself in this 18th-century vision was social. He had created man to be social and social sympathy was at the heart of humanity. Human togetherness was what made life worth living, and nothing was more conducive to happiness – a key 18th-century word, which had meant nearly nothing to 17th-century puritans, and would be abandoned by the Romantics as inherently suspect. As William Hutton, the free commercial thinker and bookseller in Birmingham, wrote in 1781:
For the intercourse occasioned by traffic gives a man a view of the world and of himself; removes the narrow limits that confine his judgment; expands the mind; opens his understanding; removes his prejudices; and polishes his manners. Civility and humanity are ever the companions of trade; the man of trade is the man of liberal sentiment; a barbarous and commercial people is a contradiction.
These are, of course, the ideas on which Adam Smith drew. Sociability, never more than when in the service of commerce, was goodness. Virtue was no lonely thing, as it had been for the puritan. It was a full and generous humanity, an acceptance of the human reality of other people and a duty of benevolence among men. Burke thought solitude ‘as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived’ and that sense of the need for a shared humanity is powerfully in play at Trafalgar. The events that followed the opening of the battle on the quarterdeck of Victory, and after that deep below in the dark of her cockpit, as well of course as on other ships, are described with an intense focus on the men involved, on their reality as people. There is, in those descriptions, quite clearly an appetite not only for glory but for sympathy. The way in which people are seen to die at Trafalgar is in fact more pathetic than heroic, more an appeal to the human heart than to an admiration for the achievements of the great. It is one of the paradoxes of heroism that a sense of humanity is one of its essential components. What, in the end, would Nelson be without humanity? As cold and admired as the Duke of Wellington.
Much has always been made of the Christ-like analogies of Nelson’s death: the suffering, the sacrifice, the acknowledged fate, the period in the tomb, the rise to glory. That element is undoubtedly there, not least in Nelson’s own mind. He knew, and had discussed with the American painter Benjamin West, the great picture West had made in 1770 of General Wolfe dying at Quebec during the Seven Years War. West’s masterpiece portrayed Wolfe quite openly in the visual terms which painters had used since the Middle Ages to depict Christ as he was brought down from the Cross: the pale skin, the dead body slumped in the arms of the acolytes around him, the light falling on the central scene, the sense of dark and apocalyptic violence behind, the central grieving, the shock and honour of the moment, the tall Union flag, or King’s Colour, half-furled so that in the composition it plays the part of the Cross itself.
When Nelson had gone with the Hamiltons to Fonthill, William Beckford’s medievalist fantasy abbey, for Christmas in December 1800, Benjamin West, then President of the Royal Academy, was among the other guests. He and Nelson spoke. The vice-admiral confessed he knew little about art:
But he said, turning to West, ‘there is one picture whose power I do feel. I never pass a print shop where your “Death of Wolfe” is in the window, without being stopped by it.’ West of course made his acknowledgements, and Nelson went on to ask why he had painted no more like it. ‘Because, my lord, there are no more subjects.’ ‘Damn it,’ said the sailor, ‘I didn’t think of that,’ and asked him to take a glass of champagne. ‘But, my lord, I fear your intrepidity will yet furnish me with such another scene; and if it should, I shall certainly avail myself of it.’ ‘Will you?’ replied Nelson, pouring out bumpers, and touching his glass violently against West’s – ‘will you, Mr West. Then I shall hope that I shall die in the next battle.’
Perhaps the story is not entirely to be trusted. It was only written down late into the 19th century and Nelson, in the bumper-filling exchanges, sounds too much like a joshing, stupid military man for the incident to ring quite true. But in the opening remark you can hear his finer voice, the voice of his letters: ‘There is one picture whose power I do feel.’ That sounds like Nelson, as does the straightforward admission that he knows it from reproductions in shop windows. Several engravings were made, many of them bearing the rubric: ‘The hero is dying at the very moment he has won a continent for the Anglo-Saxon race’ – a pre-figuring of Trafalgar of which the imperialist Nelson-Wolfe-Christ was apparently entirely conscious.
There are subtle and important distinctions to be made here. West’s Death of Wolfe was so greatly admired not because it was a portrait of a hero; nor because it demonstrated triumph; nor, overtly anyway, because it mimicked the moment of Christ’s death; but because it made heroism social. Wolfe is shown as a slight and fading figure. He is an anti-Hercules, neither a strong nor a beautiful man. He might have wandered in from administering an estate somewhere in the English Midlands, the sort of figure Gainsborough would have painted, regarding the acres he was so carefully improving, his hand stroking the muzzle of his dog. Wolfe is ordinariness itself and West’s picture shows sacrifice, valour, honour, courage and death emerging from that ordinariness, as part of the global-scale enterprise on which the humane and social civilisation of the Anglo-Saxons was embarked. West caught the moment because he had translated heroism into the realm of the humane. That model of the modern death is what shaped both Nelson’s enacting and the later telling of his own death at Trafalgar. It was not the death of a god; it was the death of a man.
In all accounts of Trafalgar, even from the beginning, the method of the story now becomes slow and intimate. The scene draws on the great slow deaths: of Jesus, of Arthur, perhaps even of Socrates. In unrelieved close-up, England was invited to watch the dignified, anxious and intensely moving humanity of Nelson in his final hours. That knowledge of the man, naked in his humanity, surrounded by the men he loved and who loved him, deeply embedded in the social reality of an England which he loved, marked him out as a hero. One of the great paradoxes of Trafalgar is that, for all its unbridled violence, it can be seen in the end as a deeply humane event.
A few minutes after 1 o’clock that afternoon, the slight figure of Nelson was walking alongside the huge bulk of Captain Hardy, taller, broader, fatter, taking their ‘customary promenade’ on the quarterdeck. Almost everything is known about the moment. Their walk to and fro, as the battle raged, was 21 feet each way. At the after end, they turned just in front of the smashed stanchions of the Victory’s wheel. At the forward end, they turned by the combings of the cabin ladder-way – the rail around the steps down to the Commander-in-Chief’s quarters. There is some doubt whether they were walking on the starboard side of it, nearer the Redoutable, as was usual for flag officers on a quarterdeck, or on the port side. Whichever it was, at about 1.15, they were within one pace of the ladder-way combings. Hardy took the extra step, but as he did so, Nelson suddenly spun around to his left. Hardy, now one step away, turned to see him in the act of falling. Nelson fell on his knees, with his left hand, his only hand, just touching the deck, holding him up for a moment. Then the arm gave way, and Nelson fell on to his left side, just at the point where John Scott, his secretary, had been killed. Nelson’s clothes, in Surgeon William Beatty’s euphemistic phrase, ‘were much soiled’ with Scott’s blood. Translated into a modern idiom, that can only mean Nelson was drenched in it. The stains of Scott’s blood can still be seen on the sleeve and the tails of Nelson’s coat, now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Hardy called out, hoping Nelson was not too badly hurt. ‘They have done for me at last,’ Nelson said. ‘I hope not,’ Hardy said again. ‘Yes,’ Nelson said, ‘my backbone is shot through.’ A musket ball had entered the top of his left shoulder, burning through the front of the epaulette with such speed and force that some of the gold bullion cords of which it was made were fused to the lead of the ball. They, a piece of the blue serge of the coat, and fragments of gold lace were found attached to the musket ball when it was retrieved from deep in Nelson’s body several weeks later. A life-size drawing was done of the strange and potent relic, with its clustering attachments, an engraving was made of it and published, Beatty had a gold setting made for the ball and it was given to the King. It is still at Windsor Castle.
From the geometry of the place of death, it is almost impossible that the French musketeer aimed at Nelson. The Bucentaure’s mizzen top was about 40 feet from where Nelson and Hardy walked. That was near the limit of an accurate range for a musket, although musket balls could kill more randomly at far greater distances. Even so, Nelson was almost certainly hidden from anyone in that top by Victory’s mainsail, which was brailed up to its yard but still hung beneath it. The musket ball was probably a ricochet, one of the pieces of metal with which the air was filled that afternoon. It broke the edge of his left shoulder blade, drove down through the body, broke two ribs, passed through his left lung and a branch of the pulmonary artery, cut downwards again and then across, breaking several vertebrae and lodged itself in the muscles of the back.
The external wound from a musket is small, but it does massive internal damage. Around the ball, as it penetrates the body, a high-pressure shock wave develops, spreading out from the track which the ball takes. As it carves its way through the organs, a cavity forms behind it. The cavity is only temporary, and as the ball drives onwards, the tissues tend to snap back into their former position. Very rapidly, the cavity pulsates, collapsing and re-expanding a few times before it finally disappears. Wherever the musket ball goes, this sudden, repeated and local expansion has the effect of an explosion within the tissue. It is as if something the size of a fist has been fired through it. By the time the ball comes to rest – and in Nelson, its lead was chipped and dented where it had collided with his bones – the internal organs have been ploughed and scarified by its passage. The body cavity then begins to fill with blood.
As the blood pumps out through the smashed tissues, the heart rate goes up and the veins constrict. The autonomic systems in the body are making their attempt to limit the damage and keep enough blood in circulation for the vital organs to continue to operate. Blood drains from the face and limbs, which soon turn pale and even bluish. But with anything approaching such a massive wound, there is nothing to be done. Blood pressure drops and the wounded man goes into shock. Without blood transfusion, a treatment unknown in 1805, he is now certain to die, within three hours at most. A tourniquet could be applied to an external wound, to staunch the flow of blood and preserve the man. Nothing could be done for widespread internal damage. Even in modern war, most soldiers suffering wounds that result in severe internal haemorrhaging die before they reach field hospital. The ‘shedding of blood’ is the way in which battle is conventionally and even politely described. The irony is that the shedding of blood – exsanguination – was precisely and dreadfully the mechanism by which battles such as Trafalgar were won and lost.
Nelson knew exactly what had happened to him. He had intense pain in the back where the ball had come to rest. His lower legs were losing sensation. His spinal cord may well have been cut. ‘At every instant,’ as the ship’s surgeon William Beatty reported to the Admiralty in December, which means at every beat of the heart, ‘he felt a gush of blood in his breast.’ That was his life pumping out of him. He was carried below to the cockpit, with a handkerchief covering his face and lying across the stars on his coat, so as not to dishearten the men of Victory. As he was laid in the cockpit among the other wounded, the battle was coming to its climax around him. It is a measure of the raging violence and noise of battle that it was perfectly possible for Nelson to be mortally wounded on the Victory and for only a small proportion of the crew even to realise he was missing from the quarterdeck.
A mile to the south, in the fight for the rear of the Combined Fleet, the Fougueux and the Belleisle had fought each other to a standstill. They drifted apart, mutually wrecked. The Mars was already out of the battle, drifting and dismasted, her captain dead, still lying where he had been decapitated, his body now covered in a Union flag. To the south, the Tonnant, after compelling one Spanish ship to surrender, went on to engage in a fearsome hand-to-hand fight with the flagship of Admiral Magon, the Algésiras. The two ships were clasped to each other in one inseparable mass, the French bowsprit tangled inextricably into the Tonnant’s main rigging. Captain Tyler of the Tonnant was shot in the leg and carried below. The Tonnant lost her main and mizzen topmasts, the Algésiras her entire foremast. The pair of them looked like a shipyard in chaos and covered in gore. On neither of their upper decks could men survive and the two ships’ companies fired destruction at each other from the great guns down below. The French attempted to board with most of the crew of the Algésiras climbing through the rigging. All but one of them were killed in the attempt, shot down by musket and clouds of grape shot fired at them from a few feet away. One Frenchman reached the Tonnant’s upper deck, to which an English sailor pinned him through the calf with a pike.
Here, too, is an emblematic moment in the story of Trafalgar. The fighting is absolute, frenzied and horrifying. The scene is probably as intense a combination of the intimate and the bloody as any in the history of warfare. At this moment, a Frenchman lies held to the deck, screaming for his life, while other English sailors are making for him with their own cutlasses and pikes. But at that moment, a British officer intervened: the switch had flicked from violence to humanity, from one aspect of the Atlanticist Anglo-Saxon culture to another, and the Frenchman was saved, to be sent below to the surgeon to have his leg wound tended.
That extraordinary moment, when uncompromising aggression suddenly reverts to care, comes to characterise the later stages of the battle. The ending of violence, its control, is even more mysterious a moment than its beginning. Tension can erupt into aggression; but how does aggression transmute into calm and even generosity? There is evidence from Trafalgar that this capacity for the humane was not simply a product of exhaustion or battle fatigue. More than that, it seems to be evidence of a mature understanding, which had emerged from 18th-century English culture, of the role and limits of violence. The Algésiras finally surrendered when her two remaining masts fell, shot through deep within the ship, always the sign of unspeakable devastation between decks. Admiral Magon was found dead on his own quarterdeck, lying in his blood at the foot of the poop ladder.
At the fight between the Victory and the Redoutable, Hardy remained on deck as the admiral was carried below. It was a desperately anxious time. After the battle, his silver pencil case was found to have the impressions of his teeth deeply embedded in it, where quite unconsciously he had chewed on the silver in the heat of battle. All round him Captain Lucas’s musketmen in the tops were having a savage effect on the Victory’s upper deck. The French musket fire killed and wounded about fifty men there and those British sailors remaining unhurt left the deck for their own safety.
The Victory’s great guns continued to fire below, but from the French there was a curious silence. As the Victory’s upper deck had no one left alive, the musketmen had no further targets to aim at. The Redoutable was now not firing at all with her own great guns. Hardy thought for a moment the Frenchman had struck. His own guns had been doing steady and uncompromising destruction below decks. Victory’s shot had been driving into the Redoutable, through the men and guns, and out again the other side. So close were the Victory’s muzzles to the French gunports that the British were afraid that the belch of flame from their own guns, and flaming wads which the detonating gunpowder blew out of the barrels after the shot, would set the Redoutable on fire. After each shot, men from the Victory threw buckets of water through the holes in the Redoutable which their shot had made, to extinguish any fire they might have ignited. A fire aboard the Redoutable would also have destroyed the Victory. This was a form of battle in which the enemy had to be nurtured if he was to be defeated. The possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction was perfectly available to them and had even been hinted at in Nelson’s suggestion that he would willingly have half of his fleet burnt to bring about the destruction of the French. But it was not a tactic which either the men of the lower deck or the lieutenants and midshipmen commanding them, were prepared to countenance. Hardy, having taken the care, now thought he had won this fight and ordered the Victory’s starboard battery to cease firing.
A strange moment of silence descended between the two ships at the heart of the battle. Gunfire from other fights echoed around them. The banks of smoke hung like curtains above the slowly stirring sea. Both captains, their officers and crews were waiting for the other to surrender. Both thought they had won and Captain Lucas prepared to board the Victory. He ordered his mainsail yard cut down so that it would bridge the gap between the two ships. He prepared his men to rush up from below, armed quite literally to the teeth – a cutlass held between the teeth allowed one arm to hold on to the rigging, another a pistol – but at that very moment Nelson’s tactical conception paid off.
This was not, as the old convention had ordained, a battle in which one ship would confront one other and duel with honour. This battle involved the massing of forces against enemy ships in order to bring about their surrender quickly and savagely. Just at the moment that Lucas’s boarding party was prepared on the Redoutable, 200 men gathered in a mass, the British Téméraire materialised on his port side. The Téméraire – 98 guns, three-decker, under Captain Eliab Harvey – was as formidable a fighting machine as the Victory herself. The Redoutable, a two-decker, found herself sandwiched between these two terrifying opponents. As a fierce musketry fight developed between the men of the Redoutable and the men of the Victory, killing 19 Britons and wounding 22, Harvey coldly ordered his upper tier of guns to fire across the decks of the Redoutable. The two hundred men were all killed or wounded. Lucas himself was hit but not killed. In the Victory, the lieutenants in charge of the divisions on the lowest decks had their guns treble-shotted, with a reduced charge of powder, and ordered their muzzles to be lowered so that as the roundshot from each broadside hammered through the Redoutable, they wouldn’t drive on into the Téméraire beyond her.
This was the savage centre of Trafalgar. On one side the Victory was still firing with her port guns into the Bucentaure, with her starboard guns into the Redoutable. The Redoutable herself was suffering massacre from the Victory on one side and from the Téméraire on the other. Men in the Redoutable’s tops, and even on her yard-arms, were throwing incendiary grenades down into both the Victory and the Téméraire. At the same moment, the Téméraire, on her far side, was getting ready to receive a collision from the French Fougueux, which had moved away from her earlier bloody encounter with the Belleisle. The Téméraire’s starboard broadside had yet to be fired in the battle. It was in its state of perfect pre-battle readiness. The Téméraire’s officers held their fire, waiting for the Frenchman to approach; 200 hundred yards was considered point-blank range. The Téméraire allowed the Fougueux to come within 100 yards before firing. It was the model of Nelsonian violence: the Fougueux was rocked back on her heels by the impact. The noise of it rolled across the ocean towards the rest of the fleet. ‘Crippled and confused’, the Fougueux now drifted down on to the Téméraire, where she was lashed alongside, as the Redoutable was on to the Téméraire’s other broadside, and destroyed.
Four vast battle ships, with a total complement of some 3,000 men, every ship largely dismasted, laden with the dead and the dying, lay clasped to each other as the Atlantic swell rolled under them. None had yet surrendered. Yards and masts lay in a net of chaos over all four. Deep in all four, in the scarcely lit decks below the waterline, hidden sorrows and private catastrophes were being enacted. The wounded were being wounded again where they lay. One British sailor was killed by the head of his friend, blown off by a roundshot and sent careering towards him. The whole assemblage was gathered in an area not much larger than a football field.
Two midshipmen from the Victory – one of them Edward Collingwood, the admiral’s nephew – were sent by Hardy in one of the flagship’s boats, along with six or seven seamen, to put out a fire which the Redoutable’s grenades or ‘stink-pots’ had started in her own forecastle. They climbed aboard the devastated Frenchman. It was another moment where savagery was folded back to allow the entrance of a shared humanity: the only way on to the Redoutable was through the stern ports and as the young British officers climbed in, they were greeted warmly and politely by the French sailors inside. Beyond those proffered hands they encountered, even on a day of such horror, a scene of which they were unable to leave a description.
The Redoutable’s mainmast and mizzenmast had both gone by the board. Her bowsprit was shot through and her fore topmast gone. She lay rolling in the water, bedraggled and broken. Her rudder was destroyed and her massive oak hull was in pieces. Several guns had burst, killing everyone around them. The human damage was unconscionable. Of her complement of 643 men, 522 were dead, dying or unable to stand. Two hundred and twenty two of them were lying waiting to be operated on by the surgeons. Three hundred dead lay on the decks. Only those who had managed to spend the battle below the waterline were still in one piece. Everyone who had been on any one of the gundecks was dead or wounded. Neither the French nor the Spanish heaved the dead overboard, as the English practice was, and the sight on the Redoutable was of a blood-drenched chaos, the bewildered and bruised faces of young men, an unheroic scattering of limbs and bodies.
No British image, drawn or painted, addressed the squalor of Trafalgar, in the way that Turner would paint the field of Waterloo on the evening of the battle, the ground surface itself merging with and even indistinguishable from the rippling, billowing landscape of the dead, a downland of corpses, lit by the flames of distant fires. But the accounts of those who saw these sights are, if anything, strangely ashamed, bemused, almost as if there were an embarrassment to battle, an awkwardness at the lowering of the cultural guard. In battle, in the sight that greeted these young midshipmen as they walked across the Redoutable, a level of human life had been exposed where humanity, in its dignified and socialised form, the most precious thing their civilisation possessed, had been for a while horribly suspended.
It is not perhaps surprising that their urge to humanity was turned to so quickly and so warmly. The horrors of battle, not during it, when the adrenaline was running, but as it ended, created a need for that warmth, for a repairing of the rupture. By about 2.15, four of the six pumps on the Redoutable had been destroyed by shot and the water was now fast rising in the hold. The Téméraire was then in possession of her prize, as she was of the Fougueux on the other side of her. Together, they represented perhaps £100,000 of prize money, a good £5–6 million today, the equivalent of £20,000 for each of the lives taken in the winning of her.
Victory was slipping away to the north, having pushed herself off from the Redoutable with giant booms. Over an hour had passed since Nelson had been carried below. The musket ball that had entered his shoulder was only part of a storm of metal then engulfing the Victory’s quarter-deck. Between forty and fifty men were carried down to the Victory’s orlop deck at the same time as the admiral. Several had died in the arms of the seamen on their way down, but still the cockpit to which the wounded were carried was crowded. As Nelson was brought in, the wounded seamen around him called to the surgeon, William Beatty, ‘Mr Beatty, Lord Nelson is here: Mr Beatty, the admiral is wounded.’ He was taken to a midshipman’s berth, and the men carrying him very nearly dropped him as they tripped in the crowded dark. Nelson was laid on a bed, stripped of his clothes and covered with a sheet. His coat was rolled up and used as a pillow for a midshipman with a head wound beside him. The young man’s head was leaking so much blood that after the battle the coat had to be cut from his hair. Wounds to the lower back almost inevitably destroy any control of the bowel or bladder. In the sanctified atmosphere of Nelson’s last hours, this is never mentioned, but among the other horrors of that place, Nelson and those around him would certainly have been lying in his own urine and faeces.
The received image of Nelson’s deathbed is of a place of quiet and privacy, surrounded by his chosen companions, as if in a shrine. It cannot have been like that. The thumping and shuddering battle was still shaking Victory to her bones. Just above his head the 32-pounder battery was still bellowing and roaring at the enemy. ‘Oh Victory, Victory,’ Nelson said, murmuring to himself as the recoil from another broadside shocked the air inside the battleship, ‘how you distract my poor brain.’ The cockpit was full of the Victory’s eighty wounded men. The shouts of those above reached down into the flickering dark. Nelson, even from the beginning, was able only to whisper, knowing he was dying, full of anxiety, repeating himself, returning to the great secret of his life. He told Beatty he was ‘gone’ and then whispered to him, ‘Remember me to Lady Hamilton. Remember me to Horatia. Remember me to all my friends. Doctor, remember me to Mr Rose; tell him I have left a will and left Lady Hamilton and Horatia to my country.’
As one by one the French and Spanish ships around Victory struck their flags, the men cheered and at each new shout Nelson asked what the noise meant. On one of these occasions, the flag lieutenant John Pasco, who was also lying wounded in the cockpit, said it was the surrender of a Frenchman. Nelson must have known that but it betrays his frame of mind, something that has also been forgotten in our knowledge of the British victory. Nelson was intensely anxious about the battle’s outcome. ‘He evinced great solicitude for the event of the battle.’ Doctor Alexander Scott and the purser, Walter Burke, a cousin of the great Edmund Burke, tried to calm him. The two of them supported his back so that he lay in a semi-recumbent position, which was how he felt least discomfort. The huge internal loss of body fluids made him thirsty. He asked again and again for ‘drink, drink’ and ‘fan, fan’ and they gave him sips of lemonade, as was given to the other wounded, as well as water and wine. They fanned him with a paper. He became desperate for cool air. Their reassuring words irritated him. Burke told him he would carry the news of the great victory to England. ‘It is nonsense, Mr Burke,’ Nelson said, ‘to suppose I can live.’ Dr Scott, the ship’s chaplain, told him he should trust to Providence to restore him to his friends and to his country. ‘Ah Doctor!’ Nelson said, ‘it is all over; it is all over.’
These are the words people say on their deathbeds. They murmur and repeat. Sharpness turns hazy, and present reality gives way to drift and uncertainty. The dying man is with the people who surround him and then profoundly alone. He thinks urgently of present needs and then just as suddenly moves into a much longer perspective, scarcely tethered to this life. Sudden moments of the old self appear, as if floating up in the mist. A young midshipman brought a message down from Hardy, desperately busy on the quarterdeck. Nelson asked who the boy was. It was Hardy’s aide-de-camp, a young midshipman called Richard Bulkeley. ‘It is his voice,’ Nelson said, his eyes clearly closed, and then: ‘Remember me to your father.’ Lieutenant Richard Bulkeley had been an army officer with Nelson in a desperate campaign in Nicaragua twenty years before, and had remained his friend ever since. It was to Lieutenant Bulkeley that he had told the story of his teenage vision, in which the radiant orb of heroism and glory had come to him on board the Dolphin.
Nelson wanted Hardy and called for him again and again, thinking his absence must mean that the captain had also been killed. They were undoubtedly friends. Hardy loved and revered his admiral and Nelson loved being loved by him. Their friendship contained within it their difference in rank, but when Hardy came down to see him, over an hour after Nelson had been wounded, what they said was the conversation between friends. Its every nuance was recorded, as though this friendship and this evidence of friendship was somehow what this battle was for.
As he was told Hardy was coming to see him, Nelson clearly summoned strength from within him, opened his eyes and sat up. They shook hands and Nelson said, ‘Well, Hardy, how goes the battle? How goes the day with us?’ That is the bright public man speaking, not the haunted, wounded figure, muttering half to himself of Emma and Horatia and the need for drink. ‘Very well, my Lord,’ Hardy said. ‘We have got twelve or fourteen of the enemy’s ships in our possession.’ ‘I hope,’ Nelson said, ‘none of our ships have struck, Hardy?’ – surely a smile attached to that? ‘No, my Lord,’ Hardy said, ‘there is no fear of that.’ Then Nelson has him come nearer, the public moment quite suddenly giving way to the private. ‘I am a dead man Hardy. I am going fast: it will be all over with me soon. Come nearer to me. Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair, and all other things belonging to me.’ Just as much as the public commander, the unexampled imposer of British violence on British enemies, this quiet and tender Nelson is the figure who stands in granite eighteen feet tall on his column in Trafalgar Square. He is the hero humanised.
Nelson comes and goes. He wants to die. He knows he is dying, but he regrets his death. He imagines Emma Hamilton there with him and feels distressed at the distress she must feel. He compares his situation to other sailors he had known who had been wounded in the spine. He talks to Beatty and tells Beatty that he is dying. ‘I know it,’ he said. ‘I feel something rising in my breast which tells me I am gone.’ It was, in all likelihood, the tide of his own blood. Beatty tells him that nothing can be done for him and, with the emotion released by expressing the words, the surgeon is then forced to turn away to hide the tears in his own eyes. Again and again, reflecting on his life, Nelson dwells on its two poles, his private and public selves. Between the sips of lemonade and watered wine, he says, almost alternately, ‘God be praised, I have done my duty’ and to the Rev. Dr Scott, ‘Doctor, I have not been a great sinner,’ the smile in that quite audible now, two hundred years later.
Overhead, the battle continued. In front of Victory, the Bucentaure had been raked in turn by the Téméraire, Neptune, Leviathan and Conqueror. The ship scarcely existed any longer. Almost every ally around her either sailed onwards, deserting their flagship, or fell away to leeward where they could play no part in defending her. The British savagery descended on the Bucentaure. Her captain was wounded in the mouth; her first lieutenant lost a leg. The senior unwounded officer was the second lieutenant and the surgeons could not cope. In all, some 450 men were killed or wounded out of a ship’s complement of about 800. Men bled to death in the dark. No seamen were left on the upper deck; there was no rigging left for them to handle and none of the upper deck guns were serviceable. Villeneuve sent the few remaining men below to save their lives.
The admiral alone, aware of the catastrophe happening to his ship and fleet, stayed above, walking to and fro on his quarterdeck. But no piece of flying metal saved him from ignominy. By about 1.40, half an hour after Nelson had been shot, all three of the Bucentaure’s masts went over the side. All the boats had been destroyed by gunfire. There was nothing Villeneuve could do but surrender. The imperial eagle was thrown into the Atlantic and the French admiral struck his flag. Within the remains of his ship, the dead were no longer recognisable but lay along the middle of each deck in rough piles of blood and guts through which the roundshot and the splinters had ploughed again and again. The British officers who went aboard to take command of the ships picked their way past these sights which left them with memories of little but disgust.
The fire of the huge 136-gun Santísima Trinidad, the only four-decker in the world, with a crew of 1,115 men, just ahead of the Bucentaure, was doing terrible damage to those around her, shots removing the stomachs and arms of the British gunners. One shot, striking one of the great guns, split into jagged pieces, each one of which killed or wounded its man. But for all that, it was only a question of time before the Santísima Trinidad, surrounded by five or six British ships, surrendered. First, as an officer on the Conqueror described it, the vast vessel ‘gave a deep roll with the swell to leeward, then back to windward, and in her return every mast went by the board, leaving an unmanageable hulk on the water.’ Every sail in the Santísima Trinidad was deployed to its fullest extent, as she had been trying in the lightest of airs to make her way out of the encircling pack of British ships: ‘her immense topsails had every reef out, her royals were sheeted home but lowered, and the falling mass of the squaresails and rigging, plunging into the water at the very muzzles of our guns, was one of the most magnificent sights I ever beheld.’ It is something of the effect, but tripled and quadrupled, which Turner painted in his depiction for George IV of Victory losing her foremast: beauty in the destruction of beauty, the summit and depths of the sublime.
Then, a moment of honour. The smallest battleship in the British fleet, the 65-gun Africa, captained by Henry Digby, decided to add the Santísima Trinidad to his tally of prizes. Her masts and colours had gone; she had ceased firing. He sent his first lieutenant, John Smith, with a party of men, to take command. He climbed up into the wreck of the Spanish flagship. The quarterdeck was mere devastation. None of the leading figures of the Spanish fleet was there to greet Smith. Admiral de Cisneros had been wounded. His commodore, Don Francisco de Uriarte and the captain of the ship, Don Ignacio de Olaeta, were with him also down below, wounded by the British gunfire. There was a Spanish officer on the quarter-deck and he greeted Smith with great courtesy. Smith asked for the surrender of the Santísima Trinidad. The officer told him, politely, that he was mistaken. The Santísima Trinidad had not surrendered. She had merely paused to provide the guns with more powder, and although she had lost all three of her masts, and she was roiling like a dead whale in the swell, she would soon resume the battle. Lieutenant Smith apologised for his ridiculous and insulting mistake, gathered his men about him, and was escorted back to the ladder, down the side of the flagship to his waiting boat and back to the Africa. This was honourable but mere bravado: the Santísima Trinidad did not fight again and the British ships left her to be taken in tow later, with her cargo of dead and her freight of wounded pride.
At about 3.30, Hardy came down below again to Nelson and again their conversation makes its turns between the inner and the outer man. The flag captain suggests that Collingwood should take over command of the fleet. Nelson, with sudden energy, attempts to lift himself off his deathbed to deny that position to anyone but himself or at least to Hardy as his deputy. There is no calm going into death here, no Keatsian acceptance of its rest. The level of tension rises in him till the last. But then Nelson falls back into the arms of Scott and Burke. ‘In a few minutes I shall be no more,’ he says. And then, even more quietly, a sudden need for intimacy, perhaps for love. ‘Don’t throw me overboard, Hardy.’ Hardy says he won’t, of course he won’t. They have already discussed where he is to be buried: not in the cold enveloping muds beneath Westminster Abbey, where the old memories of the marshes hold a terror for Nelson of dissolution and softness. No, he is to be buried in St Paul’s, high and dry on the hill around which the City of London was first made. ‘Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton,’ Nelson then says, ‘take care of poor Lady Hamilton. Kiss me, Hardy.’ It is Nelson’s cheek that Hardy kneels down to kiss, their faces close, the love acknowledged and the barriers down. ‘Now I am satisfied,’ Nelson said. There, in that calm sentence, is a kind of private millennium, an arrival, a sense that the race is done. Then again he said ‘Thank God, I have done my duty.’ Hardy stood for a few minutes looking down at the man he loved and admired. Nelson’s eyes were now closed, his mind no more than half aware. Hardy knelt again and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Who is that?’ Nelson said quickly, coming up to consciousness from the depths of his reverie. ‘It is Hardy,’ the captain said. Nelson slumped back and replied, ‘God bless you Hardy.’ With that the flag captain left the cockpit for the quarterdeck. He had been with him about eight minutes and he knew he would never see him alive again.
This minute-by-minute account of Nelson’s death is due almost entirely to the Authentic Narrative published in 1807 by William Beatty, the surgeon. It is, in one sense, Nelson’s great memorial, the depiction of the man by which he is most known. All Nelson is there: affectionate, anxious, commanding, impatient, trusting, pious, romantic, heroic, mortal. This is the figure which the 19th century inherited. Beatty’s Nelson has an air of completeness and resolution. His duty is done and in the light of that his failings are irrelevant. He worries but his worries are set to rest. Battle has become for him, as it would be for the century that followed, a kind of absolution. Deep in the company of the men who loved him, he is somehow blessed by battle and by his death within it. It is not quite a sanctification, because his sinfulness is not absent. He turns to his own guilt again and again; he thinks again and again of Emma and Horatia, both evidence, in the increasingly austere moral atmosphere of early-19th-century England, of a sin against marriage and its vows. Nelson had treated his wife abominably. In letters to Emma, he had referred to Frances Nelson simply as ‘the impediment’; he had cruelly spurned her own attempts to restore their marriage. He had explicitly longed for both her and Sir William Hamilton to die so that he and Emma might be happy together. But the sinfulness is set within the broader frame of the duty having been done, that duty consisting in the animal courage, the imposition of order, faith in his own daring, the love of his fellow officers and men, the acting out here in this bloody cockpit of the humanity of the victor. In short, as Nelson reviews his life, he recognises that, despite its sinfulness, it has been a life of honour.
This is almost a recreation of West’s Death of Wolfe, but there are differences. Nelson, like Wolfe, expires at the moment of victory, but Nelson’s death has moved away from Wolfe’s very public setting; this moment has gone downwards and inwards towards privacy. It is an individual, not a public moment. It is a private tragedy not a public loss. West painted a version of the death of Nelson which imitated his Death of Wolfe, but the Nelson painting is a failure. It is historically false, as the Wolfe picture is historically false, but the Nelson picture is false in another sense: it rings untrue in the way that its great predecessor did not. West showed Nelson expiring on deck, with half his crew around him. It looks factually ridiculous – one blast from the Redoutable would have blown them away – but more than that it looks psychically ridiculous. The setting of the scene, the mise-en-scène, contradicts the meaning of what it hopes to portray. Other, slightly ludicrous paintings were made soon after Trafalgar of Nelson’s spirit being wafted up to heaven in the arms of Britannia, the apotheosis of his spirit, but they too are little more than historical curios. Drawing on a visual rhetoric which had meant more in the age of Rubens than of Lawrence or Goya, they were public formalities which missed the point. Only one painting of the death of Nelson registered with the spirit of the time and became, in endlessly recycled engravings and prints, the image of the moment which the 19th century preserved. It was not immensely popular at the time and engravings of it were outsold by prints of West’s painting. Nor is it, in itself, a particularly painterly work. There is a slight gaucheness, a lack of authority to the figures and its author, Arthur William Devis, is remembered for nearly nothing else. His father, Arthur Devis, had painted delicate and charming conversation pieces of mid-18th-century squires and their families, scenes from which all rhetorical grandeur had been stripped away. The father’s people look more like dolls than humans and the son’s paintings, translated forward 50 years, share some of that unreality.
Nevertheless, there is an essence there. Devis’s Death of Nelson shows the scene in the cockpit. The space between the decks is painted too tall, and there is far too much light, most of it apparently emanating from the body of Nelson himself, but otherwise the scene is accurate, both physically and emotionally. The cockpit of the Victory is like a recreation of the tomb in which Christ’s body is laid. There is no publicity, no reference to larger aspects of the battle, let alone to imperial ambitions. The officers are in their uniforms but no Union flag disrupts the humanity of the scene. Benjamin West had sneered at it. It was, the President of the Royal Academy said, ‘A mere matter of fact [that] will never…excite awe and veneration.’ But that is why, for all its unearthly light, and its references to the death of Christ, the English people took it to heart as the image of a hero. A man is wounded; a man is loved; and a man dies. The absence of anything more is a reflection of his greatness. Devis’s imagery, curiously, is reminiscent of Christ’s birth in the stable.
About a quarter of an hour after Hardy left him, Nelson became speechless. His pulse could scarcely be felt and his limbs and forehead were cold. The blood was draining from his veins. Nelson’s steward, Henry Chevalier, called the surgeon who came to him from the other wounded. Nelson suddenly opened his eyes, gazed up at the deck above him and then closed them again. No words passed but the Reverend Scott continued to rub his chest. Beatty left again and within five minutes the spirit left Nelson’s body. The steward fetched Beatty again and the surgeon confirmed it. Nelson had died at about 4.30 in the afternoon, two and three quarter hours after he had been wounded.
The battle was won and Nelson knew of his victory. Twenty-five of the French and Spanish ships had been engaged by the British attack. Sixteen of them had by now surrendered. Victory was assured and Nelson had been martyred in its service.