Three Frenchmen came at him with bayonets. Swinging from a signal halyard, Spratt disabled two of them and threw the third down on to the quarterdeck. The man took Spratt with him as they fell and they hit the deck together. Spratt survived, but the Frenchman broke his neck.
By this time, others from the Defiance had followed Spratt and were climbing aboard the Aigle. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting ensued. Spratt spared the life of a surrendering French officer only to be attacked by a soldier who tried to bayonet him in the chest. Parrying the thrust, Spratt was shot in the leg instead. ‘I felt something like an electric shock and darted at him but my right leg turned up between my thighs with my shin bone resting on the deck.’ Spratt immediately wedged himself between two quarterdeck guns and continued to fight on one foot, holding off the soldier and two others until help arrived.
The Defiance meanwhile had managed to get some lines across to the Aigle and was busy warping herself alongside. Peering through the smoke, one of the first people Captain Philip Durham spotted on the Aigle was Spratt, waving a bloody leg at him over the rail. ‘Captain, poor old Jack Spratt is done up at last!’ he reported cheerfully. He then swung himself across to the Defiance and was taken down to the cockpit, where he refused to have his leg amputated on the grounds that he would never find a match for the other one.
The fight went on without him. The British won control of the poop and quarterdeck and hauled the French flag down from the stern. Lashing it to his body, Lieutenant Thomas Simons delivered the flag to the Defiance before returning to the Aigle. But the French were still in command of the fo’c’sle and still had sharpshooters in the tops – Simons was shot dead soon after his return. There were plenty of French below deck as well, sheltering behind the big guns and shooting at the British as they came down the ladders. Others were firing into the Defiance and lobbing grenades through the gun ports. They were inflicting too many casualties for Captain Durham’s liking. He decided to disengage before any more got hurt. Summoning his boarding party back to the Defiance, Durham cut his lines to the Aigle and allowed the ships to drift a few yards apart, out of musket and grenade range. Then he ordered his big guns to beat the Aigle to a pulp.
The cannonade lasted just over twenty minutes. The Aigle’s rigging was gone by then and most of her guns as well, blown completely off their carriages. Seven officers were dead and another ten wounded. The Defiance fired flaming wads, heavily impregnated with sulphur. It wasn’t long before fire broke out and the French were forced to give in rather than burn to death. Their colours came down again and they surrendered at last to the British.
‘The slaughter on board of her was horrid,’ recorded Master’s Mate Colin Campbell. ‘The decks were covered with dead and wounded. They never heave their dead overboard in time of action as we do.’ In all, the Aigle’s crew suffered a total of 270 killed and wounded before surrendering. They still had the bodies because it was against Catholic tradition to throw the dead overboard. They were kept in the hold instead, for burial later in consecrated ground.
CHAPTER 37
NELSON AVENGED
On board the Victory, Midshipman John Pollard was still shooting at the Frenchmen in the Redoutable’s mizentop. He was picking them off one by one while an old seaman named King reloaded his muskets for him from the ammunition barrel on the poop.
Pollard continued firing until only one Frenchman remained alive. The man kept changing his position, shooting from the edge of the canvas screen or dodging behind the mast to keep Pollard guessing. Towards the end, he popped up without warning and killed King with a ball between the eyes. Then he abandoned his post, waiting until Pollard had just fired before slipping down the rigging to escape before he had a chance to reload.
But Pollard was too quick for him. Whipping a musket to his shoulder, he loosed off a shot. The Frenchman dropped to the deck with a thump. He was the last of the mizentop sharpshooters to die. Lord Nelson had been avenged.
Was it Pollard who avenged him? Several Frenchmen claimed later that they had killed Nelson and lived to tell the tale, but their claims did not stand up to scrutiny. All the sharpshooters in the mizentop were killed, mostly by Pollard. The only other person Pollard knew of who might have taken the avenging shot was his fellow midshipman Francis Collingwood (no relation of the admiral):
My old friend Collingwood . . . came on the poop after I had for some time discovered the men in the top of the Redoutable; they were in a crouching position, and rose breast-high to fire. I pointed them out to Collingwood as I made my aim; he took up a musket, and fired once, and then left the poop, I concluded, to return to the quarterdeck, which was his station during the battle. I remained firing at the top until not a man was to be seen; the last one I discovered coming down the mizen rigging, and from my fire he fell also. King, a quarter-master, was killed while in the act of handing me a parcel of ball-cartridge long after Collingwood had left the poop.
But the Royal Marines had also been firing at the French. After Captain Adair’s death, Second Lieutenant Louis Rotely had taken command. He was convinced it was the surviving Marines who had avenged the admiral:
The first order I gave was to clear the mizen top, when every musket was levelled at that top, and in five minutes not a man was left alive in it. Some Frenchman has vaunted that he shot Nelson and survived the battle, and I have heard that a book has been published so stating, but it must be a romance, as I know the man was shot in five minutes after Nelson fell.
There was no time to argue about it. The French were about to board the Victory. Lucas’s men were massed by the bulwark, poised to clamber across and seize the quarterdeck. The two ships were locked in combat, fighting furiously, heedless of anything else happening around them. They were drifting down towards the Téméraire, yet scarcely any of them noticed the other ship in the confusion.
The Téméraire did her best to avoid them, but in vain. A collision became inevitable. Captain Eliab Harvey just had time to rake the Redoutable’s boarding party with his guns before the two ships crashed together. Still reeling from the broadside, the Redoutable now found herself sandwiched between two bigger British ships, both looking down on her from above. Her response was to do to the Téméraire what she had already done to the Victory – clear her deck with a hail of musketry and grenades from the tops, forcing the British onto the defensive as they took cover below.
In their excitement, the French also threw fireballs – never a good idea with ships locked side by side. The Redoutable’s crew managed to set their own ship on fire, and the Téméraire as well. The Victory was already burning. Her crew put their own flames out, then leaned over the side and emptied buckets of water onto the Redoutable’s fo’c’sle to extinguish theirs as well. The situation had become complicated with the arrival of the Téméraire. The Victory’s gunners were forced to reduce the charges in their guns to avoid shooting straight through the Redoutable and hitting the Téméraire the other side. The Téméraire’s gunners had to do the same. It was only the Redoutable that had nothing to lose.
But the Redoutable was beaten, and had been since the Téméraire’s broadside. The French had been rocked by the blast and found it impossible to recover. They were still fighting magnificently, but they could no longer hope to win. Lucas knew it was over for them now:
All our decks were covered with dead, buried beneath the debris and splinters from different parts of the ship. A great number of wounded were killed on the orlop-deck. Out of the ship’s company of 643 men we had 522 disabled, 300 of them killed and 222 wounded.
It was only French pride that kept them going at all.
Yet the Téméraire was struggling too. Damaged earlier by the Santissima Trinidad, she was also under fire from the French Neptune, only 200 yards away. Her colours had been shot away, as had her foreyard, mainmast and much of her rigging. Lashed to the Redoutable on one side, with the Victory beyond her, the Téméraire was drifting helplessly on the swell when a new threat presented itself
in the shape of the Fougueux, which now loomed up out of the smoke on the Téméraire’s starboard side.
The two ships clashed without either wanting to. The Téméraire’s crew had their hands full with the Redoutable. The Fougueux was still bruised from encounters with the Belleisle and Royal Sovereign. Bracing themselves for this new challenge, they prepared to board each other as their respective vessels came together on the tide.
The Téméraire’s starboard guns were loaded and ready. Captain Harvey held his fire until the Fougueux’s yardarms were almost touching the Téméraire’s. Then he let the French have it, all in one go. At his command, three decks of guns fired simultaneously into the Fougueux, from a range of only a few yards.
The effect was catastrophic. The Fougueux’s men had been primed to leap aboard the Téméraire and sweep all before them before going to the aid of the Redoutable. Instead, it was they who were swept away as they came alongside, vanishing as if by magic. Everything else on deck vanished as well, the Fougueux’s rigging, her upper works, everything. Her side was smashed in, the gun ports reduced to a long row of splintered matchwood running the length of the ship. If that wasn’t enough, her main and mizenmasts collapsed as well, snapped off by the impact as the two warships collided.
Pierre Servaux, the Fougueux’s master-at-arms, never forgot the horror of the moment they brushed up against the Téméraire.
At once a broadside burst from her upper-deck guns and main battery, with a hot small-arms fusillade, fired right down into us. It swept our decks clear. Even then though, our men rallied. With cries of ‘à l’abordage!’ repeated all over the ship, some sixty or eighty of them swarmed up on deck, armed with axes and cutlasses. But the huge English three-decker towered high above the Fougueux, and they fired down on us as they pleased with their musketry, until at length they themselves boarded us.
About two or three hundred of them suddenly stormed our ship, boarding via the chains and main-deck ports. Our captain fell dead, shot through the heart with a musket bullet. The few remaining men could do nothing in the face of such numbers. Resistance was out of the question while the enemy’s murderous fire continued from the gangways. We had to give way and yield, though we defended the decks port by port. So the Fougueux fell into the power of the English.
Servaux exaggerated the odds. The ‘two or three hundred’ Téméraire sailors actually numbered only twenty-nine, under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Kennedy. As soon as the two ships touched, he yelled, ‘Boarders away!’ and led his men across to the Fougueux. They were beaten back at first, but not for long. Captain Harvey ordered his carronades to spray the Fougueux’s decks with musket balls. Kennedy’s men tried again and quickly carried the ship. With the French captain dead and many other officers dying, Commander François Bazin was now in charge. Badly wounded himself, he could see that further resistance was useless.
I gave orders to cease firing and dragged myself, despite my wounds, to the captain’s cabin to get the box containing the signals and ship’s orders and throw it into the sea. Back on the quarterdeck, I was captured and taken aboard the English ship. The enemy hauled our colours down and the slaughter ceased entirely after a while.
Bizarrely, there were now four ships lashed together in a row, as if in harbour. The Victory, Redoutable, Téméraire and Fougueux were all facing the same way, their fates intertwined. The Redoutable had not yet surrendered, but it could only be a matter of time. Some burning canvas on her stern was threatening to engulf them all. Seeing the danger, Captain Hardy of the Victory ordered Midshipmen Francis Collingwood and David Ogilvie to take a few men and put it out. The young men couldn’t reach the canvas from the Victory because of the curvature of the ships’ hulls, so they jumped into a boat and rowed round to the Redoutable’s stern instead, climbing in through one of the gun ports.
To their surprise, they found themselves ‘well received’ by the French. The combatants worked side by side to extinguish the flames. Then the British said goodbye to their French hosts and returned to their boat, intending to rejoin the Victory and continue the fighting – only to discover that the boat had been cut adrift by a stray shot and they were stranded aboard the Redoutable.
But the French ship had had enough. She was so full of holes that she was in danger of sinking. Captain Lucas had only been waiting for this to be confirmed before agreeing to surrender. Reluctantly, seeing no realistic alternative, he gave the order for the colours to be lowered from the mizenmast.
The Victory meanwhile was busily disengaging from the Redoutable, casting the lines off and pushing clear of the wreck. She was still doing so when the Redoutable’s mizenmast collapsed, with her colours still flying. The mainmast fell as well, right across the Téméraire’s poop. The Redoutable was in such a state now that Lucas was afraid she would sink before he could get the wounded out. He asked the Téméraire for help, adding that if he didn’t get it he would set fire to his ship, with disastrous consequences for the British ships either side.
The Téméraire promptly sent a party aboard, bringing pumping gear to keep the Redoutable afloat. But all did not go well, as Lucas later admitted.
One of the English marines, who entered through a lower deck port, was attacked by one of our wounded sailors armed with a musket and bayonet. He fell angrily on the Englishman, shouting, ‘I must kill one more of them!’ He bayoneted the marine through the thigh, and the man fell between the two ships.
Disgusted, the rest of the Téméraire’s party downed tools to return to their own vessel. It was only after some very fast talking by Lucas that they were persuaded to stay.
While all this was going on, Lord Nelson lay in the Victory’s cockpit, listening to the men’s cheers as the Redoutable surrendered and wondering what was happening on deck. He was in great pain, wincing every time the recoil from the guns jolted his back. The chaplain and purser fanned him with a piece of paper and kept him supplied with wine, lemonade and water. With his life ebbing away, Nelson was preoccupied with Emma and Horatia, repeatedly insisting that they must be taken care of after his death. He wanted to know about the battle as well, and kept asking for Captain Hardy. Messages were sent to the quarterdeck, but Hardy never came down to see him. Nelson was convinced something had happened and the truth was being kept from him.
‘Will no one bring Hardy to me? He must be killed. He is surely destroyed.’
But Hardy was far too busy to come. He didn’t dare leave the deck with so much going on. He had not yet succeeded in getting a boat away to Collingwood, amid all the chaos. Naval regulations required Collingwood as the senior officer after Nelson to come aboard the Victory and command the fleet from there. Nelson’s flag was to remain flying ‘till the Battle is ended, and the Enemy is no longer in sight’. Until Collingwood appeared, however, Hardy was in charge. It was his responsibility, and his alone. Hardy had a silver pencil case with him, for jotting down signals. He chewed on it in moments of stress. The case became a family heirloom after his death – the teeth marks he left in it on the day of Trafalgar are visible still.
Not far away, Villeneuve faced similar problems aboard the Bucentaure. He didn’t even have control of his own ship, let alone the rest of his fleet. The Victory’s broadside had been followed by a similar one from the British Neptune that had blasted many of the Bucentaure’s remaining guns off their carriages and killed more than half the men on one of the gun decks. The Neptune had then swung to port and fired three more broadsides before moving on to attack the Santissima Trinidad’s unprotected stern.
The Neptune was followed by the Leviathan, which fired a broadside into the Bucentaure’s stern and another into her starboard side. There was very little the Bucentaure could do in reply. She had few guns still working and fewer men to work them. Villeneuve’s flagship lay at the mercy of her enemies.
Villeneuve himself was wounded, although only lightly. He had his barge ready to transfer his flag to another ship if the masts came down. Before that, though, Villeneuv
e made one last attempt to get Dumanoir’s lead squadron into the fight. Just over an hour after the battle had begun, he hoisted a second signal for Dumanoir, one that was unequivocal in tone. Signal 167 stated simply: ‘The van division to wear together.’ In laymen’s terms, Villeneuve was ordering Dumanoir’s squadron to turn round and get into the action.
The signal had barely been hoisted when the Conqueror arrived in the wake of the Leviathan and fired yet another broadside into the Bucentaure. This one brought the mizenmast down and also the mainmast, taking Villeneuve’s signal with it.
But the signal had flown long enough for Dumanoir’s squadron to see it. They understood the message all too clearly. It could hardly have been plainer.
At least one of the ships was already turning round and sailing back to the fight. Promoted to command the Intrépide after the death of the previous captain in Calder’s action, Captain Louis Infernet had been appalled by Dumanoir’s reluctance to turn about after Villeneuve’s first signal. He had waited a long time for Dumanoir to give the order before taking matters into his own hands. Suspecting that Dumanoir had no intention of getting involved, he had begun to wear his own ship round – incidentally colliding with the Mont Blanc in the process and smashing her bowsprit – and was now heading back to the fight, aiming straight for the Bucentaure. Villeneuve’s flagship lay at the heart of the action, surrounded by the enemy. The Intrépide was coming to her rescue as fast as conditions would allow.
The rest of Dumanoir’s squadron now followed, some glad to be getting into the fight at last, others reluctant to join in at this late stage. Among other things, it wasn’t easy to turn about without any wind. Most had to lower boats and tow their ships round manually, as Infernet had done. Even then, sailing into the thick of an action already lost held little appeal for many of them. They advanced only unwillingly towards the fray.
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