October 21st to
October 28th 1805
Nobility: Dignity; grandeur; greatness
SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755
As Nelson lay dying, one English officer was failing him. In the aftermath of Trafalgar, it was easy enough to imagine that everyone had played their part as the dictates of honour required. Certainly, Collingwood was reluctant to criticise any of the officers afterwards and only the faintest echoes survive of anything approaching cowardice in the British fleet. There is some evidence, though, that one of the English commanders, third in command after Nelson and Collingwood, Rear-Admiral the Earl of Northesk (he had unexpectedly inherited the title after the death of his elder brother), was reluctant to engage. As his flagship, the Britannia, approached the battle, Northesk stood on the quarterdeck, arguing with his captain, Charles Bullen. It was said that, with the fight already raging in front of them, Northesk ordered Bullen to reduce sail. After the battle, there was certainly some bitterness in the British fleet at Northesk’s reluctance to dive into the brutal and murderous mêlée which their colleagues were subject to. Edward Rotheram, Collingwood’s flag captain on the Royal Sovereign noted in his commonplace book afterwards that Northesk, ‘behaved notoriously ill in the Trafalgar action.’
The earl never commented on the events of the day. But he had no need of victory or glory to advance his standing in British society. He was already possessed of all it might offer him. And Northesk’s holding back at Trafalgar did his name no harm. He became a Knight of the Bath, received the thanks of parliament, wore his gold medal, was given the freedom of the City of London, and its sword of honour, treasured his 300-guinea vase from Lloyd’s of London – Trafalgar made the life of British marine insurance brokers a great deal easier – and continued to advance smoothly up the lists of the admirals, as if he too had been ferociously and nobly engaged. Of all the commanders in the battle, only Northesk, when he died in 1835, joined Nelson and Collingwood in the crypt of St Paul’s, honoured as one of the three great Trafalgar men, simply because he had been an admiral and he was an earl. However apocalyptic an event Trafalgar might have been, certain social realities endured. Unlike nearly everyone else at Trafalgar, Northesk had more to lose – his life and limbs – than to gain. Secure in his position, he was not subject to the mechanics of honour. Dishonourable behaviour was for him a rational choice in a way it never would have been for the captains around and ahead of him, needing to stake all for glory and riches.
At the same moment as Northesk was shortening sail, an equivalent scene was unfolding in the van of the French fleet. Early that morning, Villeneuve’s battle plan had fallen apart when Admiral Gravina’s Squadron of Observation had become muddled up with the rear of the Combined Fleet. Villeneuve had been left without a tactical reserve and the Franco-Spanish ships had as a result been exposed, one by one, to the overwhelming superiority of British gunnery and aggression. But Villeneuve had another option. The van of the Combined Fleet might itself have played the part of a tactical reserve. Nelson’s attack, just astern of the Bucentaure, had left the Combined van, under the command of Admiral Pierre le Pelley Dumanoir, untouched. As the battle developed, Dumanoir continued sailing blithely north. For nearly two hours, with the eight valuable ships of the van around him, in perfect, pre-battle condition, he did not turn. He was abandoning his admiral, his fellow captains and their cause. The logs of the British ships – heavily engaged and buried in gunsmoke – do not comment on Dumanoir’s departure. He is simply an absence.
No one has ever resolved whether the reason for Dumanoir’s failure to come to the aid of the rest of the fleet was carelessness, cowardice or defeatism. Earlier in the year, he had been in command of the fleet when in Toulon and Villeneuve had been appointed over his head. Like Churruca, he too may have felt that Villeneuve was unsatisfactory as a commander and that to preserve the ships of the vanguard was in itself a practical if inglorious course.
In Dumanoir’s column, sailing away from the realm of honour, was a captain for whom such behaviour was unthinkable. On the Intrépide, Captain Louis Antoine Cyprian Infernet’s eyes remained fixed on the masts of Dumanoir’s flagship, the Formidable, desperately searching for the signal which he wanted Dumanoir to make: to go about and take part in the Battle of Trafalgar. Infernet was a big man, thought to be as vastly tall as a drum-major (he was 5’ 10”) and ‘as fat as an abbot’, rough, uneducated and ferocious, born near Toulon, who bellowed at his crew in the broadest Provençal. He was in other words, a brigand fighter, precisely the sort of man the Revolution had brought to the fore, for whom the idealistic honour of the fight was its own form of nobility.
Villeneuve, in the midst of the chaos and mayhem around the Bucentaure, had in fact made the signal for Dumanoir to return but, perhaps because of the gunsmoke, Dumanoir did not see it and continued northwards. Infernet could tolerate it no longer, and at about 2 o’clock wore ship without Dumanoir’s instructions, using one of his ship’s boats to bring the Intrépide around, as the winds had become so light that the ship would not respond to her helm. Soon afterwards, Dumanoir signalled the whole of the vanguard to reverse direction, and they too needed their ship’s boats to haul them round. The manoeuvre took an hour in the light airs. Five of them set off to leeward of the battle. Others including Dumanoir himself in the Formidable kept to windward.
Why he should have turned when he did is as much of a conundrum as why he did not turn earlier. Perhaps one can see in it the slow influence of honour, which is not an on-off switch, but a moral force gradually applied. For an hour or so, fear, self-preservation and disdain for Villeneuve may have kept Dumanoir sailing north. But the slow application of honour, as a moral imperative, may by then have had its effect, and forced Dumanoir to turn.
The Intrépide was already en route for the enemy. Infernet, when asked for instructions from the master, bellowed to the helmsman: ‘Lou capo sur lou Bucentauro!’ – Lay the head on the flagship! With the density of gunsmoke, and the light winds doing little to disperse it, Infernet could not have seen the situation Villeneuve was in. But the pure geometry and mathematics of the day could have told him that the centre of the Combined Fleet, with the brutal firepower of British three-deckers now in among them, was in dire need of help.
A young French aristocrat, Auguste Gicquel des Touches, was a sub-lieutenant stationed on the forecastle of the Intrépide. He left a graphic account of Infernet’s plunge into the midst of battle, driving down through the wreckage and violence in order to rescue Villeneuve. When they finally reached the flagship, both she and the Redoutable lay mashed by the guns of the British fleet. Fremantle in the Neptune and Bayntun in Leviathan had both slapped into both French ships. The masts were down in both of them, their fire almost silenced, just an occasional gun crew maintaining sporadic shots at the enemy around them. It was not a place, with any reason, that a French ship should go but the drive motivating Infernet was not subject to reason. He wished, Gicquel des Touches wrote,
to rescue the Admiral, to take him on board, and to rally around us the vessels which were still in a fit state to fight. The plan was insane, and he himself did not believe in it; it was an excuse that he was giving himself in order to continue the fight, and so that no one could say that the Intrépide had left the battle while she still had a single gun and a single sail. It was a noble madness, which cost us dearly, but which we did with joy and alacrity: and which others should have imitated.
That is a note which is not found among the British accounts of Trafalgar. For all the hazards associated with Nelson’s perpendicular drive at the iron teeth of the Combined Fleet’s broadside; for all the questioning among the officers of the Royal Navy of that tactical idea; there is never a suggestion that this way of conducting battle was ‘noble madness’. It was calculated risk, thriving on the sense that victory could only emerge from damage, and that annihilation of the enemy required an entry into the zone of acute danger. The difference between these mentalities, in other words, was the difference between death and destruction as a means to an end and as an end in itself. Self-sacrifice might have been accepted by Nelson and others in the British fleet as a possible cost; it was not the purpose of battle, as it had by now become for Infernet.
Collingwood had formed something of a line to resist the ships of the French van now coming south towards him. Infernet drove past that line. The 64-gun Africa fired at him, but the Intrépide’s guns bellowed back and Africa was silenced. Gicquel des Touches found a young midshipman on the forecastle beside him. His face was calm and his bearing upright, maintaining, with his body, the language of honour. Gicquel offered him a glass of wine, which the boy took, but as he brought it up to his lips he could control himself no longer. His hand shook so much that the wine spilled all over the deck. Perhaps as any man would, Gicquel then grasped the boy’s hand and told him that he admired him, and that courage lay not in the absence of fear but in mastering it.
British ships clustered around the Intrépide: Bayntun in the Leviathan, with rigging and rudder shot away after a bruisingly murderous encounter with the San Agustín, but still firing; Sir Edward Berry in the Agamemnon; Codrington in the Orion; even Northesk’s Britannia which had by now lumbered into battle. Is it possible to conceive the degree of terror which such a sight would instil in any man, particularly those exposed on the deck of the Intrépide, as this ring of death closed around them? These moments on Intrépide represent one of the most desperate situations in the battle, entirely brought about by Infernet’s drive for self-sacrificial honour.
Gicquel des Touches, frantically applying his men on the forecastle to repairing and reknotting the standing rigging by which the foremast was held up, was also keen – ‘my ardent desire’ – to use them to board a British ship. Codrington in the Orion, fighting the coolest-headed battle of all, saw that his friend Henry Bayntun was in trouble, with the beautiful Leviathan’s rig largely shot away, and manoeuvred to take on the Intrépide in his place. Bayntun hailed Codrington as he passed ‘and said he hoped, laughing, that I should make a better fist of it.’
If there is something of the cricket match in that careless, gentlemanly, amused remark, a moment in which the ideal of the British naval officer seems to be fulfilled, as though a scene in a penny print entitled ‘The Gentleman Gives Way’ or perhaps ‘After You Sir’, nothing could be further from the atmosphere of extreme anguish on the Intrépide. Gicquel des Touches saw
the English vessel Orion pass in front of us in order to fire a series of broadsides at us. I arranged my men ready to board, and pointing out to a midshipman the manoeuvres of the Orion, I sent him to the captain to beg him to steer so as to board.
Savagery was being poured in the Intrépide. Two thirds of her men were now killed or wounded. The sea was hosing in below where shot had punctured the hull. The shrieking of the wounded was drowned by the bellowing of guns. The concentration of British firepower in the centre of the battle was focused on her.
In the forecastle, Gicquel des Touches waited for the change of course which would drive her bow into the Orion amidships. But no change of course occurred. Codrington’s men fired broadside after broadside into the bow of the Intrépide as they passed. Alongside, half a pistol shot away, the Britannia slammed at her with her upper batteries. This was annihilation in action, precisely the devastation which Nelson had required. The Orion slipped beyond reach and Gicquel des Touches went back towards the quarterdeck to find out why his recommendation had not been followed.
On his way there – and this may be the most poignant failure of courage in Trafalgar, a scene for a matching penny print, this one entitled the ‘The Midshipman’s Dread’ – Gicquel des Touches found the boy he had sent back a few minutes earlier, lying down behind the bulwarks of the Intrépide, flat on his stomach, terrified by the sight of the Britannia alongside, unable to move, let alone stand up and walk as far as the quarterdeck to deliver his message. In all the accounts of Trafalgar as they have been preserved, this is the rarest of experiences: paralysing terror. Gicquel des Touches kicked him in the backside and then went on to find Infernet. The captain was breathing fire, slicing off the carved wooden balls on the rail with his sabre and threatening anyone who talked of surrender – undoubtedly the right course of action – with death.
Dumanoir’s squadron, coming south, had divided in two, half of it passing to windward of the battle, half to leeward, neither having much effect on the outcome. One ship after another fired at them as they came past: the Mars, the Royal Sovereign, the Téméraire, the Bellerophon and the Victory. It was these guns firing at Dumanoir’s passing ships which Nelson in his last moments heard deep within the bowels of the flagship, shaken by their roaring, to which he muttered, as Beatty so carefully recorded, ‘Oh Victory, Victory, how you distract my poor brain.’ Dumanoir kept well to windward. ‘It is too late to push in now,’ he told his flag captain. ‘To join in the battle now would be only an act of despair. It would only add to our losses.’ The Victory’s log says they ‘fired our larboard guns at those they would reach.’ But even such long-distance fire was made to tell. The Formidable had 65 men killed and wounded on board and the hull was damaged enough for the water to be rising in her hold at the rate of four feet an hour. Her mainyard was broken, her sails shot through, her bowsprit and the mizzenmast shattered. This was damage enough for Dumanoir to claim he had played his part at Trafalgar. It didn’t impress Napoleon who after the news of the battle reached France expressed the desire to see Dumanoir either shot or ruined. He eventually escaped either fate and became a distinguished sailor after the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne.
Dumanoir fired at those British ships that confronted him, and even at the French and Spanish prizes around them. It was a perfectly deliberate act. The Formidable was seen to back her topsails so that she would slow down while firing into the prizes, simply to give herself longer on the target. His gunfire killed and wounded several on board, French, Spanish and English, and scandalised the officers. This was not part of the manners of war. Perhaps it adds another possible reason for Dumanoir’s strange behaviour this day: panic. He soon made off to the south with his four sail-of-the-line. Eleven ships to leeward joined Admiral Gravina, who was gathering what remained of the fleet, to conduct them in to Cadiz. Several British ships began to chase them but were recalled by Collingwood.
Battered in the midst of the battle, the Intrépide was now a mass of wreckage. She had been firing with both broadsides at once and even with her stern-chasers. No living Frenchman remained on her decks. All her masts had been shot away and had gone by the board. The guns were ‘clogged with the dead’. The ship itself was a corpse, leaking, all the lids of the gunports torn off. Most of the guns were disabled, eight feet of water was in the hold and rising, despite the efforts of the men at the pumps, 306 officers and men were killed and wounded, 45% of those on board. Even then, Infernet could not bring himself to surrender and his surviving officers had to hold him down while the colours were lowered.
‘Ah what will the Emperor say,’ he groaned as he watched, ‘after I told him that I could fight my way through ten battles and I have failed at the first?’ Napoleon, in fact, would honour him. But the crew of the Intrépide felt they had done enough. As Gicquel des Touches wrote in his memoir of the battle: ‘At least our honour was saved, the task accomplished, duty fulfilled to the uttermost.’ It was a demonstration of courage which impressed the British officers. On the Conqueror, Lieutenant Humphrey Sen-house said in a letter home that the defence of the Intrépide ‘deserves to be recorded in the memory of those who admire true heroism.’
At this distance, it is worth interrogating this scene a little more. What was in control here? What drove Infernet to his suicidal mission, to risk all, not for any hope of a positive outcome, because it was surely clear by the time he arrived in the heart of Trafalgar that he could make no difference at all, but simply for the symbolism of martyrdom?
The recent history of France had put a particular spin on the idea of heroism, idealism and self-sacrifice. In some ways, the French Revolution had been profoundly conservative. The modernising trends which had been in play in France throughout the 18th century were cut short in the new revolutionary ideology. In the third quarter of the 18th century, France had been making aggressive strides in the direction of an Anglo-style, commercial, Atlantic entrepreneurial culture. The French nobility, conventionally portrayed as affected, self-indulgent and out of touch, were in fact closely involved in finance, business and industry, especially in the booming Atlantic sugar and slave economy of the West Indies. Nor were they crusty old families, descended from the knights of the Middle Ages. Fully a quarter of all French aristocratic families, 6,000 of them, had been ennobled in the 18th century, bourgeois families who had joined the élite. In their hands, France’s foreign trade had increased tenfold in the 60 years before the Revolution.
That entrepreneurial drive had been interrupted and destroyed at the Revolution and replaced with a far more static and Roman ideal of nobility. If the late-18th-century shift in England had been from the Virgilian to the Homeric ideals of manhood, as the dominant ideology of England turned towards market success, in France it went the other way. Paradoxically enough, revolutionary and Napoleonic France was dominated by Roman and even aristocratic ideals.
Livy, Plutarch, the fierce demands and emotional appeal of Roman oratory, Cicero as ‘père de la Patrie’ – these were the models to which the revolutionaries appealed. In them they saw the nobility of republicanism, fiercely dividing itself off from the luxury and corruption of the materialist world around them. Civic morality, a Rousseauesque rigour, an enthusiasm for liberty, stoic self-possession and an austere masculinity were all the ingredients of a Roman, republican integrity. The Corinthian enrichments of mid-18th–century Europe gave way to Doric rigour. Even hairstyles, led by the example of actors on the Paris stage, showed the world the sort of man you were. Unlike the elaborated curls of the aristocrats (in which Villeneuve appears, interestingly, in his portraits), straight, unpowdered hair, cropped short and brushed forward – modelled, it was said, on the hair of English roundheads – showed you were a true republican. An article appeared in Patriote français in October 1790:
This coiffure is the only one that is suited to republicans: being simple, economical and requiring little time, it is trouble-free and so assures the independence of a person; it bears witness to a mind given to reflection, courageous enough to defy fashion.
This was, in other words, Infernet hair. It was evidence not of particular actions, but of the condition of your soul, of being in a state of republican grace. The outcome of any action mattered less than your moral wholesomeness when you engaged in them.
Of course there are many echoes in France of changes in England. The Rousseauist ideas which form such a potent backdrop to Trafalgar – that the good man is not the affected dandy posing at court and lying his way into luxuries of a hypocritical world, but standing foursquare in his honest simplicity, sobriety, stoicism and directness – that is a common European inheritance. But in France, it fed straight into the dazzlingly powerful exporting of the Revolution to the rest of Europe, seen in France not as an act of imperialism but of revolutionary idealism. France was like a citadel of freedom besieged on all sides. Her rampage through Europe had been a break-out from that citadel, releasing a tidal wave of liberty to the benighted: Belgium and Savoy in 1792, the Rhineland and the Netherlands in 1794, northern Italy and Venice in 1797, Switzerland in 1798, followed by Rome, Malta, Naples and Egypt. The people of Europe, and even of the world, were being shown the light.
That is not, of course, how it was seen in England nor by her allies on the continent of Europe, but it is central to the fighting idealism of Infernet’s drive into the blood and destruction of Trafalgar. In November 1792, the French National Convention had declared ‘in the name of the French nation that she will bring help and brotherhood to all people who want to recover their freedom.’ Goethe, witnessing the arrival of the French armies in Germany, thought ‘they seemed to be bringing only friendship, and really they did bring it. All of them were in a state of heightened exhilaration, with great enthusiasm they planted trees of freedom, to everyone they promised self-government and the rule of law. In front of our eyes, hope was floating in the air of the future and drew our gaze towards new ways, newly open…’
For all the often-remembered horrors and brutalisations of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, there is this underlayer of heroic republican idealism, a sense that the perfect vision of humanity had been glimpsed, before sinking under the blood, shock and terror of a pan-European war. The death and wounding of so many on the Intrépide was in the service of that ideal, whose goal was not victory but a state of mind, an honourable freedom, complete in itself, beyond any thought of survival or gain. That was not an English idea. The English wanted victory, but, in that sense, Auguste Gicquel des Touches’s words were a precise description of the French: their honour had been saved.
The battle was nearly over and devastation lay afloat on the Atlantic. The mastless hulks, no longer with any sails aloft to act as a stabilising vane, rolled in the swell. On the Santísima Trinidad, a Spanish officer surveyed his surroundings.
The English shot had torn our sails to tatters. It was as if huge invisible talons had been dragging at them. Fragments of spars, splinters of wood, thick hempen cables cut up, as corn is cut by the sickle, fallen blocks, shreds of canvas, bits of iron, and hundreds of other things that had been wrenched away by the enemy’s fire, were piled about the deck, where it was scarcely possible to move. Blood ran in streams about the deck, and in spite of the sand, the rolling of the hull carried it hither and thither until it made strange patterns on the planks. The enemy’s shot, fired as they were from very short range, caused horrible mutilations. The ship creaked and groaned as she rolled, and through a thousand holes and crevices in her hull the sea spurted and began to flood the hold.
At 6.30, the English took possession of her and began to heave the dead overboard, 254 killed, and others dying among the 173 wounded. In the Combined Fleet as a whole, the number of dead has never been established. It might well have been in the region of 4,000 men. Perhaps twice that number had been wounded and just over 11,000 had been taken prisoner. Between two and three thousand more would be drowned or die of their wounds in the coming days: a total perhaps of 6,500 dead. The number of British casualties is strikingly low and exact: 449 dead, 1,214 wounded, several hundred of whom would also die in the coming weeks, perhaps a total of 650 dead. That was the winning ratio: ten to one.
In one French ship, with only her foresail set, the captain stood on the poop, holding the lower corner of a small French flag, while he pinned the upper corner with his sword to the stump of the mizzenmast. She fired two or three guns, probably to provoke some return fire, and to spare the crew the shame of a tame surrender. The Conqueror was alongside her and the British broadside was ready to destroy the Frenchman. Then the Conqueror’s Captain Israel Pellew shouted, ‘Don’t hurt the brave fellow; fire a single shot across his bow.’ Her captain immediately lowered his sword, thus dropping the colours, and, taking off his hat, bowed his surrender.
Courtesy and humanity eased into the spaces which battle had opened up. Far down at the southern end of the battle zone, the Prince, one of the heavy slow sailers at the rear of Collingwood’s division – she was said to have approached the battle like a haystack and her captain, Richard Grindall, was another who was said to have behaved ‘notoriously ill’ – had come up with the French Achille, which had already received the attentions of three British ships. A fire had already broken out in the chest containing arms and cartridges in the top on the foremast. The Achille’s fire pumps had already been smashed in the battle and the fire blazed up into the sails above it. Then the Prince fired a high broadside into the vessel and cut the foremast in two. The topmast fell with its fire into the waist of the ship, setting fire to the boats and spars that were stored there.
The whole ship was soon ablaze and the Prince ceased firing when her captain saw men on the Achille jumping overboard. Deep within her, below the waterline, there was a woman on board, Jeannette Caunant, stationed in the passage of the fore-magazine, working to assist in handing up the powder to the men in the batteries. When the firing ceased, she tried to make her way up to the lower deck and then to the main deck, looking for her husband. But passage was impossible. All the ladders joining the decks had either been removed or shot away. It was a desperate situation. Surrounded by the mangled, the wounded, the dead, the body parts, she could see the fire burning down through the decks to reach her. As the flames weakened each deck, the guns themselves burst down through the burning planks on to the decks below, each gun three tons of red-hot metal smashing down like depth charges around her. She climbed out through a gunport and then hung above the water, at the stern of the wreck, awaiting her fate. The little British schooner, the Pickle and a cutter, the Entreprenante, along with boats from the Prince and the Belleisle ran in as close as they could to the wreck, ‘to save the people which were floating on different spars belonging to the ship’, even though the already-shotted guns, as the fire reached them, were blowing off uncontrollably and unpredictably. In all, in a fore-echo of the rescues of the days to come, between two and three hundred Frenchmen were rescued by the British from the Achille. Jeannette Caunant was also pulled from the sea, naked, and taken to the Pickle, where she was dressed and her wounds tended.
Then the ship blew up. A British officer on the Defence watched it:
It was a sight the most awful and grand that can be conceived. In a moment 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.
It was a vision of explosive war, of the victims of war tossed like the black leaves of a tree radiant with fire and light, fulfilling all the expectations of apocalypse. As the fragments fell back into the Atlantic, and the shattered remains of the Achille sank, a black pig was seen swimming strongly through the swell. The men on the Euryalus caught, killed, butchered, roasted and ate it that evening.
The battle was nearly at its end. The fervour of the morning had given way not to triumph nor to any sense of glory, but to desperation among the defeated, and to both exhaustion and dejection among those who had won. Very few people knew what had happened to Nelson and it was not his death which governed the final reactions to battle; it was the nature of the battle itself, an experience of bruising mutual destruction from which those involved emerged deadened.
Thomas Hardy, Nelson’s flag captain on the Victory, when he later returned to England with all ‘the Ships Flags and Pendants half Mast on the melancholly occasion’ and his admiral’s body preserved in the biggest water butt they could find, a leaguer, lashed in the heart of the ship, and stood over night and day by an armed marine, had one thing to tell his navy friends. ‘You have often talked of attacking a French line-of-battle ship with two frigates,’ he said to Captain Parker of the Amazon who came aboard at Spithead. ‘Now, after what I have seen at Trafalgar, I am satisfied it would be mere folly, and ought never to succeed.’
‘Mere folly’ is a phrase which in early-19th-century English still means ‘total and utter folly’: and Hardy’s remark is in the voice of sobriety and battle-shock, a measure of what had occurred at Trafalgar, of the cold sluice of horror delivered to his appetite for battle. The enemy had responded with a ferocity and obstinacy which neither he nor his friends had been prepared for. The last two major fleet actions had been at the Nile in 1798, when the French had been surprised at anchor, half the crews were ashore and the unprepared gundecks were cluttered with stores and baggage; and at Copenhagen in 1801, when the Danes, also at anchor, had never considered themselves a match for the British fleet. The resistance they had met at Trafalgar had come as some shock.
Hardy’s remarks are also astonishingly modern in their tone, full of a sense of battle reality which, we assume too easily, was scarcely known before the twentieth century. But it was known, and the condition that became known as shell shock or battle fatigue could be found in Georgian England. In a fragment written in 1798 and later included in the Prelude, the young Wordsworth described how he had met a discharged soldier on the road and walked alongside him:
While thus we travelled on I did not fail
To question him of what he had endured
From war and battle and the pestilence.
He all the while was in demeanour calm,
Concise in answer: solemn and sublime
He might have seemed, but that in all he said
There was a strange half-absence and a tone
Of weakness and indifference, as of one
Remembering the importance of his theme,
But feeling it no longer.
This half-absence, this dejected disconnection, which Wordsworth later described as ‘the ghastly mildness in his look’, is the result of horror undergone. The last phase of Trafalgar, and the storm which followed it, both contributed as much to that experience as anything that had gone before.
Lieutenant Philibert on the Tonnant surveyed the appalling scene. In the quiet of the early evening, all order had gone. All the beauty of the morning had been shot away. The wounded sobbed as they were moved and shrieked as they had their clothes stripped from them. For all that, a kind of silence had descended.
The smoke which had enveloped us up to then having cleared, our first glances searched for our fleet; there no longer existed any line on either side; we could see nothing more than groups of vessels in the most dreadful condition, in the place more or less where we thought our battle fleet ought to be. We counted 17 ships from the two navies totally dismasted – their masts gone right down to the deck, and many others partially dismasted.
On the Conqueror, Lieutenant Senhouse saw it all as ‘a melancholy instance of the instability of human greatness.’ Those beautiful fleets which only a few hours previously had been ‘towering in all their pride on their destined element’ were now these shattered hulks, ‘lying like logs on the water, the surface of which was strewed with wreck.’ On the Belleisle Lieutenant Nicolas thought ‘Nothing could be more horrible than the scene of blood and mangled remains with which every part was covered, and which, from the quantity of splinters, resembled a shipwright’s yard covered in gore.’ Nicolas’s comparison was exact: battle was a dismantling yard, a place in which the elaborate assembling of ten thousand separate particulars was disassembled, in which order was converted into disorder and an act of civility turned into pandaemonium, a version of hell drenched in blood, like a gravy. No beauty in this violence, just dis-orientating and re-orientating damage.
Admiral Gravina, that morning, had called the Argonauta ‘the most beautiful flower in my garden’. Now officers from the Belleisle made their way across to her in a pinnace to take the Spaniards’ surrender. They could hardly find a living person aboard. It was another wrecking yard of dismantled bodies and disintegrated gear. What remained of the crew was hiding below. The captain was wounded. The men from the Belleisle took the second captain, Pedro Albarracin, back to their ship, where they brought him to the cabin of their own captain, Edward Hargood. There Hargood accepted Albarracin’s sword and in return offered him what hospitality he could. He gave him a cup of tea. As he and other officers from the Belleisle were drinking the tea, exhausted, melancholic, dwelling on the day of chaos and destruction, the death of friends, the shrieks of pain still coming from the wounded far below them in the ship, a lieutenant from the Naiad came into the captain’s cabin. He had news: Nelson was dead.
On the Royal Sovereign, Collingwood was seen in tears. One of his sailors wrote home: ‘Our dear Admiral Nelson is killed! So we have paid pretty sharply for licking em. I never set eyes on him, for which I am both sorry and glad; for to be sure, I should like to have seen him – but then, all the men in our ships who have seen him are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed.’ Those ships that did not receive the news directly looked out in the evening to the Victory. She was lightless and no Commander-in-Chief’s night-signal burned in her rigging. After the Battle of the Nile, on that very evening, after the terror and anguish of battle, the British captains held a long, loud and celebratory dinner. Nothing of the kind happened after Trafalgar and the British fleet ended the day sunk in gloom.
From the Mars, where her Captain George Duff had been killed by a roundshot which decapitated him, his 13-year-old son Norwich was transferred into the care of Henry Blackwood on the Euryalus, along with his schoolmaster William Dalrymple. In a sea of grief, the collection of letters now written to Sophia Duff, expresses the full range of the aftershock. These letters are, in miniature, a model of the British frame of mind in victory, surrounded by death.
First, Norwich sat down to write to his mother at home in 30 Castle St, Edinburgh. His big, open handwriting carefully followed the lines he had ruled on the paper, occasionally striking through a spelling mistake or an unnecessary word. For the battle, his father had sent him off the quarterdeck and down into the lower gundecks, where according to his schoolmaster he and the other boys ‘had fought like young Nelsons.’ Now this particular boyman comforted his mother, to whom his father had been in the habit of writing every day, with words of stoic heroism:
My dear Mama
You cannot possibly imagine how unwilling I am to begin this melancholy letter: however as you must unavoidably hear of the fate of dear papa I write you these few lines to request you to bear it as patiently as you can he died like a hero having gallantly led his Ship into Action and his memory will every be dear to his King his Country & his friends.
But Norwich cannot keep up this Roman face for long. Now on board the Euryalus, Blackwood had been ‘very polite & kind to me’. The frigate captain wanted to keep the boy with him, as one of his young gentlemen. But Norwich longed for home:
I would much rather wish to see you & to be discharged into the guard Ship at Leith [outside Edinburgh] for two or three months. My Dear Mamma I have again to request you to endeavour to make yourself as happy and as easy as possible. It has been the will of heaven & it is our duty to submit.
Believe me your obedient and affectionate Son N. Duff.
It is difficult to believe that receiving such a letter would do anything but exacerbate the pain. Norwich survived into the age of photography to become a Victorian Vice-Admiral. There is a photograph of him looking crusty, be-whiskered and bald, in a frock-coat sitting on a pompous chair, taken in 1860, two years before he died, a version of the world for which Trafalgar was fought and his father died.
At the foot of Norwich’s words, the schoolmaster Dalrymple added his own note, hand-wringingly aware of the pain of loss but at the same time wavering between anguish and congratulation, the 19th-century cult of the martyr vying for space in these few lines with the 18th-century cult of sensibility, proud of the dead man, gapingly open to the reality of grief.
Mrs Duff, Dear Madam
It is with sincere uneasiness and regret that I have occasion to offer my condolence to you on the late unfortunate but glorious and honourable fate of our worthy generous and brave captain, whose name will ever be revered and whose character will ever be esteemed. Believe me, I am your ever respectful and obedient humble Servant W. Dalrymple
Duff’s first lieutenant, William Hennah, who had commanded the Mars in the battle with skill and distinction after Duff had been killed, wrote to Sophia on 27 October, when still off Cadiz. His letter can lay claim to being the most dignified and loving document to emerge from Trafalgar. In all its hesitations, and quivering on the brink of pomposity, in its deep sense of hurt and sympathy, its reticence and reluctance to intrude, its own grief and tender care for Sophia’s grief, its half-articulateness, relying at its crucial point on the most commonplace phrases and ideas, it is, to use a word that should only rarely be used, replete with nobility:
Madam,
I believe that a more unpleasant task, than what is now imposed upon me, can scarcely fall to the lot of a person, whose feelings are not more immediately connected by the nearer ties of kindred, but from a sense of duty, (as first Lieutenant of the Mars,) as being myself the husband of a beloved partner, and the father of children; out of the pure respect and esteem to the memory of our late gallant Captain, I should consider myself guilty of a base neglect, should you only be informed of the melancholy circumstances attending the late glorious, though unfortunate victory to many, by a public gazette. The consequences of such an event, while it may occasion the rejoicings of the nation, will in every instance be attended with the deepest regrets of a few.
Alas! Madam, how unfortunate shall I think myself, should this be the first intimation you may have of the irreparable loss you have met with! what apology can I make for entering on a subject so tender and so fraught with sorrow, but to recommend an humble reliance on this great truth, that the ways of Providence, although sometimes inscrutable, are always for the best.
By this, Madam, you are in all probability acquainted with the purport of my letter. Amongst the number of heroes who fell on that ever-memorable 21st inst. in defence of their King and Country; after gloriously discharging his duty to both; our meritorious and much respected Commander, Captain George Duff, is honourably classed; his fate was instantaneous; and he resigned his soul into the hands of the Almighty without a moment’s pain.
Poor Norwich is very well. Captain Blackwood has taken him on board the Euryalus, with the other young gentlemen that came with him, and their schoolmaster.
The whole of the Captain’s papers and effects are sealed up, and will be kept in a place of security until proper persons are appointed to examine them. Meanwhile, Madam, I beg leave to assure you of my readiness to give you any information, or render you any service in my power.
And am, Madam, with the greatest respect,
Your most obedient and most humble servant,
WILLIAM HENNAH.
That tender tone of voice, which does not seek to obscure the dreadful realities of war but understands the value of life beyond and outside them, might also be seen as the quality for which Trafalgar was fought. It is the opposite of a raging, militaristic delight in violence. It is a return to the world of children, home, quiet and settled ease, in which, as Hennah imagines with a painful reality, the events of 21 October had in the Duff household created such a searing wound. The irony of Trafalgar is that such a world could only be reached through a battle as intense and all-absorbing as the one in which George Duff had died. Even here, almost entirely buried below the level of conscious thought, the deep pattern is steadily at work of millenarian peace reached through apocalyptic violence.
On the evening of the battle, the men could take stock. In the log of the Swiftsure, Thomas Cook, the master, wrote that evening:
British ships taken sunken or destroyed – none Of Combined fleet taken sunk burnt or distroyed – 22 of the line
Cook had overestimated slightly. The true total was 17 taken, one blown up, but that, by any measure, was a victory. But the damage was horrific and in all ships the men now had to make their vessels workable. On Victory, at 5 o’clock that evening, the mizzenmast fell about ten feet above the poop, ‘the lower masts, yards & Bowsprit all crippled, rigging and sails very much cut, the Ships around us very much crippled.’ The men set up emergency rigging, runners and tackles, to prevent the other masts from falling over. She got under way ‘under the remnants of Foresail and maintopsail’, the men deep into the night ‘employed Knotting the Fore and Main Rigging and Fishing [reinforcing with an extra timber] and Securing the Lower masts.’ The carpenters stopped the shot holes. On the Mars all the masts were tottering – ‘cut half asunder’ – and they had ‘no sails fit to set’. Every brace and piece of running rigging had been shot away and not a single shroud was left standing. On the Africa, hundreds of feet of oak, elm and deal planking were brought up from the stores for repairs. Three copper sheets and 400 feet of sheet lead were nailed over shot holes in the hull. An anchor stock was used as a ‘fish’, a reinforcing timber, for the shot bowsprit. Booms and spars were used to fish the mizzenmast. In other less damaged ships, such as the late arriving Britannia, it was running rigging that needed repair. On her, buoy rope was used to replace a fore topmast stay shot away. Thousands of feet of rope were rove through the blocks to replace halyards and braces shot away during the action.
But in savagely damaged ships, there could be no such return to neatness. In the Africa, the whole of the foremast, the whole of the mainmast and the whole of the mizzenmast, each with their associated topmasts and topgallant masts, with the boom irons and the studding sail booms and yards, had all been lost in the battle. As they fell down, they had crushed the materials on deck. The crew managed to jury rig the ship, using a main topgallant mast as a make-do mizzenmast. The ship’s pinnace had been stove in during the action and was now repaired with copper sheeting. The glass in the main cabin which had been shot out was replaced. Only twelve days later, on November 3, did the carpenter make this sombre entry in his accounts:
Used in whitewashing the orlop
Glue 8 lbs
Lime 8 lbs
Brushes 4
With the whitewash they were erasing the memory of blood, deep down in the Africa, where the wounded had been treated and the dying had died.
Collingwood was faced with a monstrous task. A fleet of over fifty ships was his to control. Half of them were dismasted. The storm, which all predicted, was in the offing and would undoubtedly be on them before many hours were out. It would come in from the southwest and that would put them on a lee shore fringed with murderous shoals. After the battle, it felt like the revenge of the sea itself. Victory meant prizes and prizes meant money. Surveying the wrecks around them, men on all ships reckoned up their winnings. A midshipman might hope to get £100 from the prize money, a chaplain £500, each seaman maybe £30, a captain perhaps £10,000, enough to set him up for life. These were rewards on a spectacular level, more than four times what the fleet had received after the Battle of the Nile. The total value of the ships they had captured was perhaps £1.5 million – although Collingwood that evening reckoned on £4 million – somewhere between £75 million and £200 million today. The men, in their exhaustion and their grief, were staring at a sea full of riches; but the storm threatened the haul.
For the next dreadful week, a triangle of forces held the British fleet in its grasp. The three controlling elements in play were the weather, the money and, most astonishing of all, a sense of humanity, a concern for the fate of their enemies. The tenderness of a Hennah or a Dalrymple was not confined to the officers nor directed only to a grieving widow in distant Edinburgh. For day after day, British crews risked their lives to save those of the French and Spanish sailors which the storm was threatening. If it had not been for the storm, the British could have taken their prizes easily in tow and made with them for Gibraltar. If not for the prizes, they might, largely unencumbered, have made their own way to safety. And if not for their humanity, they might quite casually have set the prizes adrift, with no care for the men on board. But each of these three demands was equally insistent and it made for a week of chaos and destruction, as horrifying as the day of battle had been.
The storm did not come on at first, and in the light winds and heavy swells, getting and keeping the heavily rolling dismasted ships in tow was an agonisingly difficult task. Tow ropes parted, towing ships misjudged the wind and were run into by the ships they were attempting to tow. The Royal Sovereign smashed into the Euryalus and carried away sections of her rigging and superstructure. Other ships were drifting inexorably towards the shoals off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson, early on the day of battle, had ordered the fleet to anchor after the action, and had reminded Hardy of that order as he lay dying. But Collingwood, as any seaman might, dreaded the notion of anchoring off a lee shore, and relying merely on the anchor warps to hold the ships away from the shoals. He wanted his valuable, damaged fleet to sail itself out of difficulty.
On 22 October the first of the ferocious winds came in from the southwest. Ship after ship swayed and trembled in front of the storm that was probably blowing Force 10 or even 11, a steady 50 knots of wind, gusting higher than that. In the Euryalus, staysails were split and blown away to shreds in heavy squalls at midnight. Men were sounding continuously with the leads for any warning in the dark of a shallowing sea, listening and looking for breakers to leeward. Early in the morning, just before dawn on the 23rd, Victory’s main yard, an enormous piece of timber, was suddenly torn away in the gale, splitting two huge pieces of canvas, the mainsail and the maintopsail, which tore themselves into useless rags in the wind. Twenty minutes later the Royal Sovereign’s foremast collapsed overboard, taking with it all the sails and rigging of that mast. She hoisted the signal 314, meaning ‘Ship is in distress and in want of immediate assistance’. Guns, including the enormously heavy carronades in the poop, were being tossed overboard by the savagely quick motion of the unmasted ship, on which even seasoned sailors were being violently sick. Everywhere in the scattered, desperate fleet, tow ropes gave way, sheets snapped, loose-flapping sails shot themselves to rags. In the smaller ships of the fleet, the cutters and schooners, giant seas were being shipped aboard while men worked desperately at the pumps. Guns, shot, old and useless sails, anything unnecessary for the task of survival was heaved overboard. The Leviathan had to cut away the fore and main courses to save her masts. The Mars lost one cutter when the painter by which she was towing her gave way. Another cutter and a pinnace which they were towing were swamped and sank with all their gear. Her rudder was almost in two. At ten to six that evening, what remained of the ship’s company gathered together to ‘Commit the Body of Captn Duff to the Deep.’
On board those ships which had been smashed and ruined in the battle, life was even more precarious. The Fougueux broke her tow and drove ashore, smashing herself apart on the rocks and drowning very nearly every one of the men in her who had not been killed in the battle, a total of 546 dead out of a crew of some 650. One of the survivors described it afterwards only as ‘a scene of horror’, full of shrieking and groaning, tense with the anger of ‘insubordinate men who would not help at the pumps, but only thought of themselves.’
In the Redoutable, the space between the decks was still heaped up with the battle-dead, the bodies rolling in a soft, rotten mayhem with each violent motion of the ship. The English Swiftsure took her in tow and a prize crew was put on board what can only have been a horror ship. All night long, English and French worked alongside each other at the pumps to keep her afloat, deadening, muscle-wrenching work. Some of the young French midshipmen began to hide arms in dark and secret places in the ship, preparing to retake her, whispering to Lucas, their defeated captain, of their plans. He took it as a sign of the heroism of young Frenchmen. But at midday on the 23rd, her only remaining mast collapsed, broken away by the rolling of the ship, and five hours later, she signalled the Swiftsure. The water was gaining on them in the hold and the Redoutable would soon sink. The men of the Swiftsure got out their six boats, rowed back through the terrifying seas to the prize and transferred the English prize crew and about 100 wounded and 30 unwounded Frenchmen – all that was left of the 645 officers and men who had started the battle on her – to their own ship, gingerly lifting them down from the quarterdeck where the wounded had been brought up from below and laid out. Again and again the Swiftsure’s boats returned to her in seas running desperately high. At seven o’clock that evening, the poop of the Redoutable was underwater, and by 10.15 she sank, going down by the stern, taking with her the 300 dead and some 90 wounded who they had not been able to rescue. The men of the Swiftsure had taken extraordinary risks, at no benefit to themselves. It was an act, as Nelson had requested, of pure humanity. As they rowed away for the last time, it ‘was the most dreadful scene that can be imagined as we could distinctly hear the cries of the unhappy people we could no longer assist.’
But fifty of those men managed to escape her and survive the night in the sea. At half-past-three the next morning, the log of the Swiftsure records, ‘heard the Cries of some people & out Pinnass & part of the Crew of the Redutable on a raft & brought them on board.’ At seven that morning: ‘Discovered 2 other rafts with People on them that had saved there lives from the Redutable while sinking.’ The men of the Swiftsure went out to get them in their boats, but when they came alongside, many of the horribly wounded and exhausted Frenchmen were unable to get up the ship’s side, never easy in the rolling of the swell. Some of them died in the boats as the English sailors watched from above. Many were naked and the Swiftsure ‘Served some slops to those who were destitute of cloaths.’ The prisoners were then housed as deep as they could be in the ship, below the orlop deck, in the very nastiest part of the hold. ‘Heaved overboard on order of captain to make room for Prisoners water casks 60, Butts 30, Puncheons 31.’ Almost the only predicament it can have been preferable to was death by drowning.
On the morning of the 23rd, a small squadron made up of five ships-of-the-line and a few frigates, all of which had escaped with Gravina into Cadiz, came out again in an attempt to recapture some of the prizes. Henry Blackwood on the Euryalus was, as ever, writing to his wife.
Last night and this day, my dearest Harriet, has been trying to the whole fleet, but more so to the Admiral who has the charge. It has blown a hurricane, but, strange to say, we have as yet lost but one ship – one of our finest prizes – La Redoutable; but which I feel the more, as so many poor souls were lost. The remains of the French and Spanish fleet have rallied, and are at this moment but a few miles from us – their object of course, to recover some captured ships or take some of the disabled English; but they will be disappointed, for I think and hope we shall have another touch at them ere long.
It was a brave attack. The British took it seriously, and Collingwood dispatched the Neptune, the Britannia, the Defence, the Dreadnought and the Leviathan to meet the threat, the ships clearing for action as soon as the sails were seen emerging from Cadiz. But the prizes and their damaged British accompaniment were nearer Cadiz than the British force which Collingwood sent to defend them and at first it went well for the Franco-Spanish squadron. The Neptuno, under a small British prize crew, couldn’t hoist enough sail to escape. The Spanish prisoners on board rose against the prize crew, retook the ship and the Neptuno was soon taken in tow by the French frigate Hermione. The Thunderer felt she couldn’t defend herself if she had the giant Spanish three-decker, the Santa Ana, in tow and she cast her off. The Santa Ana was then towed into Cadiz Bay. The Conqueror then abandoned the Bucentaure for the same reason and she was driven ashore and wrecked. Two prizes had been retaken, one destroyed. Only the cool-headed Edward Codrington on the Orion managed to make off with the Bahama in tow.
That night, though, conditions worsened. The Spanish Rayo lost all her masts, after her crew refused to climb the masts to reef the sails. She was driven ashore. The Neptuno and the San Francisco de Asís both dragged their anchors and were wrecked. The Argonaute and the Indomptable ran aground and broke up in the surf. The Santa Ana was safe in Cadiz, but overall the little fleet that had come out to strike a small blow back at the British had been destroyed. This was the end of any threat to revise the verdict of Trafalgar.
The storm still had four days to run before it would begin to ease. Monstrous seas were now rolling into the Gulf of Cadiz. The Belleisle which had experienced such a bruisingly dreadful battle was now in the most extreme and anxious danger. All three of her masts had gone and the ship was now attempting to sail on short jury masts rigged by the crew out of a few spare yards and booms, tightly lashed or woolded to the old mast-stumps. She had been under tow by the frigate Naiad but the tow had parted in the mountainous seas. Repeated attempts had been made to reconnect the frigate with ‘the ungovernable hulk’ of the Belleisle but the two vessels had crashed into each other and the Naiad’s stern virtually smashed in. She had withdrawn to preserve herself. Now the Belleisle – and is it any surprise that in these conditions men should attribute to their ships a sort of courage of their own? – was attempting to make her way close-hauled out of the Gulf of Cadiz, around Cape Trafalgar and into the safety of the Strait. But under a jury rig, no ship can keep close to the wind, and for every mile southwards they were making, they were making almost a mile to leeward.
Under the thrashing of the sea, two big 24-pounder guns broke loose from their lashings and careered around between the decks, dealing out damage to men and material as only a loose cannon could. With great difficulty they were ‘choked up’ with the men’s hammocks. Roundshot rolled between the bodies of men who were too exhausted from working the pumps to do anything about them. With each roll, seas were breaking over the quarterdeck. The men on board thought they were going to die. At midnight, the captain summoned his officers to tell them that the Belleisle would soon take to the ground and they should prepare themselves. Every man knew what was meant: in raging seas over offshore reefs, men do not survive. ‘Shipwreck in such a hurricane was certain destruction to all.’ All night they waited, expecting death to come upon them. They lay in the dark, thinking of home. Just before dawn, with the help of a scrap of sail hoisted on a jib-boom that had been rigged up as a foremast, they managed to turn their ship away from the land and its murderous breakers. The next morning the Naiad found them again and, with all her sails set, spread fair before the westerly wind, with port and starboard topsail studding sails and royal studding sails on both the main and the foremast, looking like a swan of a ship, every stitch of glory up, towed the Belleisle into Gibraltar. The garrison had received news of the victory. They had been looking out for the victorious fleet but this was the first sign of it: a sea-and storm-battered frigate towing behind her a single, mastless, battle-ravaged, jury-rigged, patched and hammered ship-of-the-line. But a huge white ensign was flying from a flagstaff on her taff-rail and, as the Belleisle was warped slowly into the Gibraltar mole, every man on every ship in Gibraltar manned the yards and cheered her.
It was time for brutal decisions. Codrington in the Orion decided that he could not keep both the Orion and the Spanish prize he had in tow, the Bahama, off the lee shore. He ordered the tow rope cut, abandoning the 548 Spanish prisoners and the 50-odd men in the British prize crew to their deaths. Or so Codrington thought. In fact, by pure luck, the Bahama and its men survived, managing to anchor in the surf just off Cadiz beach the next morning, in a desperate condition, the rudder smashed, seven feet of water in the hold, but at least alive. There, for the time being, they would stay.
On other ships, it is difficult to imagine how men could tolerate such a form of existence. An English lieutenant and four English midshipmen, with 50 English sailors, were guarding about 400 Spaniards on board the Monarca. Like every other ship she was making several feet of water an hour and the pumps had to be worked continuously. Her mizzen and mainmast had gone, and the crew was desperately heaving overboard guns, anchors, shot – anything to lighten the ship. The British sailors had broken into the Spanish liquor store and were now lying drunk beside the bodies of the dead which no one had yet thrown into the sea. One of the young midshipmen, the 19-year-old Henry Walker, fell into the deepest despair. Battle had been tolerable compared with this. The fear of the Spanish rising on the few remaining Englishmen in the ship who were not drunk; the threat of the violence of the storm, the worst that even seasoned sailors had ever seen; the presence, for many hours at a time, of the threat of death: all this besieged the midshipman.
When the ship made three feet of water in ten minutes, when our people were almost all lying drunk upon deck, when the Spaniards, completely worn out with fatigue, would no longer work at the only chain pump left serviceable; when I saw the fear of death so strongly depicted on the countenances of all around me, I wrapped myself in a union jack, and lay down upon deck for a short time, quietly awaiting the approach of death.
Young Henry Walker from Manchester, lying in the dark, wrapped in the union jack, thinking of death; you would scarcely believe such a picture on a stage, or even on a recruiting poster, but there is no reason to doubt its truth. And what does that intuitively chosen action describe? Perhaps the deep melancholy of battle and its aftermath; perhaps an overwhelming fear; perhaps a death conceived as honourable. It may be difficult for us now to see authenticity in a patriotic act, but that is simply a measure of the distance between now and 1805. The midshipman wrapping himself in the national shroud: perhaps one should dare to see in that a noble gesture? But death, however nobly and patriotically imagined, didn’t come to Henry Walker. The Monarca also, for the moment, survived. The Spanish and the British officers together managed to get the ship before the wind and the next day drove her into the shallows off the Cadiz beaches, where she anchored.
By the morning of the 24th, Collingwood, overloaded with the responsibility of command, and appalled by the situation in which he and his broken fleet found itself, decided to cut his losses. Some of the prizes had escaped. Others had been swept up in the Franco-Spanish sortie of the 23rd from Cadiz. Some had sunk and others had broken up on the shore. Collingwood, apart from anything else, clearly needed some relief from the overwhelming anxiety of his command. To wait here on this lee shore much longer would be to risk the loss of a British ship-of-the-line. At 8.30 a.m. he made a general signal to the fleet. ‘Prepare to quit and withdraw men from prizes after having destroyed or disabled them if time permits.’ It was the standard language of the signal book, but it meant that between the desire for money and the brutal exigencies of the storm, the storm had won.
At ten o’clock, after Henry Bayntun on Leviathan had asked by signal for confirmation of the admiral’s intention, Collingwood confirmed, in even more brutal phrases: ‘Withdraw English, cut masts and anchors away from prizes.’ What then evolved over the next four or five days, as one English ship and crew after another rescued the men – English, French and Spanish – who were on board the prizes that were to be destroyed, is one of the most unbrutal and humane actions ever undertaken by the Royal Navy. It is thought that about 2,000 men drowned in the Trafalgar storm, but there is no case of a Spanish or French crew drowning without men of an English prize crew drowning at the same time. In other words, there was no abandoning of the prisoners. Where they could be saved, they were. Uncounted numbers, perhaps amounting to about 8,000, were rescued. When you consider the sheer hazard of what Henry Bayntun called ‘the vast rolling sea’ bowling into the Gulf of Cadiz from the southwest, and when you consider what the men had gone through in the preceding days, their state of exhaustion, what they managed was a miracle.
That night, the evening of the 24th, the storm reached its height. The little cutter, the 70-foot Entreprenante, lost the jolly boat from her stern, tore the after-leach of her mainsail and carried away her topmast. Soon afterwards, the entire mainsail split and went overboard. Under little scraps of sail, her trysail and storm jib, she attempted to weather the worst. Seas were coming into her, the water was rising in the hold and she made repeated signals of distress with her guns. She was crowded with 157 men rescued from the Achille, four times the number of her own crew, more than 200 men in a 70-foot cutter. They were desperately short of water. More and more material was heaved overboard ‘to lighten her being nearly Water logd. Split the foresail and storm jib at midnight.’
Again and again boats drove into the breaking waves inshore to rescue men from the San Agustín, the Monarca, the Argonauta, the French Swiftsure and the Bahama. Boats from the Leviathan took all but 150 of the most dreadfully wounded out of the Monarca before she was burnt The Intrépide, on which everyone was drunk, was very nearly emptied of its crew, the last four taken off in the dark on to the Orion. She was then set alight and blew up as she sank. From the Argonauta, 387 were laboriously transported to awaiting British ships.
The vast Santísima Trinidad had fifteen feet of water in her hold when she was finally abandoned, only after nearly a thousand people, between three and four hundred of them wounded, had been taken out, mostly through the windows of the stern galleries. ‘What a sight when we came to remove the wounded,’ a British officer remembered. ‘We had to tie the poor mangled wretches round their waists, and lower them down into a tumbling boat, some without arms, others no legs, and lacerated all over in the most dreadful manner.’
As the last of the prisoners were being loaded into the boats, a sailor from the Revenge witnessed a scene whose story would be told again and again in 19th-century England:
On quitting the ship [the Santísima Trinidad] our boats were so overloaded in endeavouring to save all the lives we could, that it is a miracle they were not upset. A father and his son came down the ship’s side to get on board one of our boats; the father had seated himself, but the men in the boat, thinking from the load and the boisterous weather that all their lives would be in peril, could not thinking of taking the boy.
As the boat put off, the lad, as though determined not to quit his father, sprang from the ship into the sea and caught hold of the gunwale of the boat, but his attempt was resisted, as it risked all their lives; and some of the men resorted to their cutlasses to cut his fingers off in order to disentangle the boat from his grasp. At the same time the feelings of the father were so worked upon that he was about to leap overboard and perish with his son.
Britons could face an enemy but could not witness such a scene of self-devotion: as it were a simultaneous thought burst forth from the crew, which said, ‘Let us save both father and son or die in the attempt!’ The Almighty aided their design, they succeeded and brought both father and son safe on board our ship where they remained, until with other prisoners they were exchanged at Gibraltar.
At the last, British carpenters went aboard the Santísima Trinidad and cut holes below the waterline through which the Atlantic poured. As the boats left, the shrieks of the terminally wounded men on the lower decks could be heard as they felt the water rising to drown them. Thomas Fremantle saved a pug-dog from the wreck of the great ship, as well as a statue of the Virgin Mary, which the Fremantle family still treasure at home in Buckinghamshire.
For days and nights the dreadful task continued. The Donegal, which had joined the British fleet after the battle from Gibraltar, now performed prodigious rescues on ship after ship. She took 626 men out of the Rayo. Hundreds drowned attempting to get on to dry land through the surf. The French Berwick had all the wounded Frenchmen taken off and then the English prize crew, but the weather worsened, and the Berwick was driven ashore with another 300 hundred men still in her. The Donegal then got 184 out of the Bahama, helped in the rescue by some Spanish fishing boats.
By the 27th, the winds had started to ease and the anarchy of weather and destruction began to abate. Prisoners were exchanged with the Spanish. British officers, led by Henry Blackwood who hadn’t slept or washed for days, dressed themselves in their most dignified uniforms to pay courteous visits to the officials in Cadiz. The Spanish admired them for it. No British ship had succumbed either to the battle or the storm. Even the little Entreprenante survived. Of the nineteen prizes they managed to save only four. The others were wrecked, sunk or burnt. It was a financial catastrophe, the hoped for £1.5 million reduced to a fifth of that. Parliament recognised the injustice and boosted the prize money by a special grant of £300,000, so that each captain in the end received £3,362, lieutenants £226, midshipmen £37 each and the seamen £6 10 shillings.
On 28 October, the tough-minded, frightening and ambitious Thomas Fremantle on the Neptune was writing to his wife Betsey in Swanbourne. The Neptune had the battered remnants of Victory in tow. Strapped in her middle gun-deck, stood over by a marine, the body of Nelson rested in its giant closed barrel, filled with spirits. But Fremantle wasn’t dwelling on the drooping melancholy of the scene. The tone of his letter is a reminder that an aggressively self-interested frame of mind had driven the British fleet to victory and had even played its part in the extraordinary seaman-like and humanitarian efforts of the week of the storm. Fremantle was thinking of the future: ‘This last Week,’ he told his wife,
has been a scene of Anxiety and fatigue beyond any I have ever experienced but I trust in God that I have gained considerable credit. I am at present towing the Victory and the Admiral [Collingwood] has just made the signal for me to go with her to Gibralter, which is a satisfactory proof to my mind that he is perfectly satisfied with Old Neptune, who behaves as well as I could wish. The loss of Nelson is a death blow to my future prospects here, he knew well how to appreciate Abilities and Zeal, and I am well aware that I shall never cease to lament his loss while I live.
No grief expressed for the loss of Nelson, except in terms of what it would mean for Fremantle’s career and hopes of promotion. No sense of sublime triumph. No belief in the beauty of battle. The point of war was to win, to get on in the world, to make some money, to garner the prizes. Still at sea on the long roll of the Atlantic, Fremantle was still acting to the dictates of the go-getting, materialist and driven officer-class which the culture of 18th-century England had created.
A few miles away, on the long beach south of Cadiz, an Englishman, anxious for news of the battle, found a landscape drenched in another mood, the essence of what the century to come would take from Trafalgar:
As far as the eye could reach, the sandy side of the isthmus bordering on the Atlantic was covered with masts and yards, the wrecks of ships, and here and there the bodies of the dead…While surrounded by these wrecks, I mounted on the cross-trees of a mast which had been thrown ashore, and casting my eyes over the ocean, beheld, at a great distance, several masts and portions of wreck floating about. As the sea was now almost calm, with a light swell, the effect produced by these objects had in it something of a sublime melancholy, and touched the soul with a remembrance of the sad vicissitudes of human affairs.
This was printed anonymously in the Naval Chronicle and, as the writer recognised, what he was describing was the sublime, the strange, poetic and ambivalent pleasure to be taken from the broken, the dreadful and the damaged, particularly when seen on such a scale. It is a painterly and theatrical image, which had already been imagined, painted and described many hundreds of times in the previous century. The near calm, the removal from battle, is of its essence. ‘When danger or pain press too nearly,’ the young Edmund Burke had written in his essay on the Sublime, ‘they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modificaions, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.’ Somewhere deep in the substance of Trafalgar, in its victory, its damage and its loss, was something profoundly satisfying to the early-19th-century frame of mind.
England grieved for Nelson as they might for a hero of the theatre or the opera. For the hero to die at his moment of triumph, even as a signal that the triumph had been achieved, was once again the aesthetic requirement of the moment. The version of ‘King Lear’ with which the 18th century had always been happy, in which Cordelia doesn’t die, now for the first time since the early 1700s seemed inadequate. To make the play complete, to bring about the heroic sublime, Cordelia had once again to die, to be carried on stage dead. Can it be a coincidence that Nelson’s death, at precisely this moment in his drama, also conforms to the pattern of the tragic sublime? Or that Nelson was the first British admiral to have died in action since 1720?
A decade after the battle, Wordsworth, in his Thanksgiving Odes, written to celebrate the final victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, would address the God he was thanking for the victory.
Thy most dreaded instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is Man – arrayed for mutual slaughter, –
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!
The slaughter of these wars was seen by Wordsworth as divine virtue at work. ‘Carnage is God’s daughter’ was a phrase which shocked his more radical contemporaries, but it would find sympathetic echoes in 19th-century England. Thomas de Quincey agreed that ‘among God’s holiest instruments for the elevation of human nature is “mutual slaughter” amongst men’. De Quincey thought war allowed man to breathe ‘a transcendent atmosphere’ and to experience ‘an idea that else would perish: viz. The idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, doing and suffering, that finds its realisation in battle.’ The disgusting reality of war – the rolling of the corpses in the mastless hulks during the Trafalgar storm, the blood making its patterns on the deal planks of the decks, the quantities of whitewash needed to obscure the bloodstains on the orlop decks of every ship, the spattering of men’s faces with the remains of their friends, the actual appearance of the terrible splinter wounds – that becomes obscured under the sublime and theatrical beauties and the exquisite moral drama of distant violence.
Such a conception of war became the Victorian orthodoxy. For Ruskin, war itself was the foundation of beauty. ‘There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle,’ he told a London audience in 1865. It was a frame of mind which drew on the theatrics of Trafalgar, a celebration of what Ruskin called ‘creative, or foundational war’,
in which the natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of beautiful – though it may be fatal – play…To such war as this all men are born; in such war as this any man may happily die; and out of such war as this have arisen throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity.
These disturbing words – and this habit of mind among 19th-century Englishmen – are the context in which the legacy of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson are to be understood. The great and dreadful victory at sea on 21 October 1805 played itself out in the mind of Englishmen as a near-perfect example of violent moral theatre whose sublime beauty relied on its distance and its dreadfulness. It became for them a form of battle-arcadia, a place in which the ordinariness, the disappointments and the compromises of everyday life were somehow absent. The fact that Wordsworth, de Quincey and Ruskin, like the majority of 19th-century Englishmen, had never been near a war was central to their beautiful conception of it. Neither they nor their audiences had any idea what it was like.
This understanding of war lasted, at full strength, until the shock of the trenches. It is the received idea of Trafalgar, of Romantic Battle, which infuses, for example, a letter written by a young British lieutenant, Alexander Gillespie, on the evening before his company went into the attack at Loos on the Western Front in 1915.
My dear Daddy,
Before long I think we shall be in the thick of it, for if we do attack, my company will be one of those in front, and I am likely to lead it…It will be a great fight, and even when I think of you, I would not wish to be out of this. You remember Wordsworth’s ‘Happy Warrior’:
Who if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad, for human kind,
Is happy as a lover, and attired
With sudden brightness like a man inspired.
Well, I could never be all that a happy warrior should be, but it will please you to know that I am very happy, and whatever happens, you will remember that…
Always your loving
Bey.
Poor Gillespie knew only what the tradition of Romantic Battle, with its roots not exactly in Trafalgar but in the received idea of Trafalgar, had taught him. Only with the mass exposure of Englishmen to the humiliating and nauseating realities of battle could such a conception begin to die. Then the vision was replaced by something like this, lines written by Wilfred Owen:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues.
In the hands of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, war came to be seen not as a shrine to innocence, but as its destroyer. The shadow, or perhaps the light of Trafalgar, with its halo of courage, beauty and honour, its powerful and Elysian idea of the Happy Warrior, lasted only until the killing fields of industrial war.
The 19th century had chosen to remember only the Happy Warrior; the 20th century only ‘the blood come gargling.’ Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar: the uncompromising violence; the dedicated grip on the need for ‘annihilation’; the seeking of victory through exsanguination; combined with a hunger for honour; a belief in the reality of noble ideas; self-possession as a mark of nobility; and behind all that a tender and active humanity. However reluctant people have become to describe battle in this way, these are the ambivalent ingredients of sublime and noble war, of a kind which Homer and Virgil would have recognised, and all of which were undeniably there on 21 October 1805. It was a brutal amalgam and remains an inheritance with a troubling moral ambiguity at its heart.