Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  I was an eye-witness to a sight equally revolting. A man named Aldrich had his hands cut off by a shot, and almost at the same moment he received another shot, which tore open his bowels in a terrible manner. As he fell, two or three men caught him in their arms, and, as he could not live, threw him overboard.

  The sheer shambolic squalor of these battles is not to be underestimated. The ships were smeared with blood. The blood rolling to and fro across the deck painted patterns on the clean-scrubbed deal. Afterwards, large parts of the ships had to be repainted and each ship carried in its stores the paint necessary to efface the gore.

  Nor were these single crises. The cannonading, or the ‘smart salute’ of the broadside, as 19th-century commentators on naval warfare often liked to call it, went on often for an hour or even more at a time. There was no quick solution to the destruction of men for the most part hidden within the walls of their floating wooden blockhouse. Down on the maindeck, manfully bringing his powder to the guns from the magazine, Leech saw death and wounding around him again and again.

  One of the officers in my division also fell in my sight. He was a noble-hearted fellow, named Nan Kivell. A grape or canister shot struck him near the heart: exclaiming, ‘Oh! my God!’ he fell, and was carried below, where he shortly after died.

  Grape and canister shot poured through the port-holes ‘like leaden rain’. The sound of the large shot striking the ship’s side was ‘like iron hail’. The whole body of the ship was shaken by their impact, a deep, groaning thudding. Even worse, when these 24lb or 32lb balls penetrated the hull, giant splinters, several feet long, would go spinning through the confined space of the gundecks, killing and maiming any bodies trying to inhabit what had become knife-filled air. A shot that came through the gunports was called ‘a slaughtering one’ and it usually killed or wounded the entire gun crew. The dead were then shoved out into the sea by the hole through which their death had come.

  Men, in these circumstances, do not react, as one might imagine, with shrinking terror. There is a mindlessness to a battle of this intensity. What is repeated again and again, in all accounts of Trafalgar and other battles, is the cheering, ‘the deep roar of the outpoured and constantly reiterated ‘Hurra! Hurra! Hurra!’ They cheer each other on, filling with the noise of their own voices the space which terror might inhabit. Leech addresses the strangeness of that behaviour:

  The battle went on. Our men kept cheering with all their might. I cheered with them, though I confess I scarcely knew for what. Certainly there was nothing very inspiriting in the aspect of things where I was stationed. So terrible had been the work of destruction round us, it was termed the slaughter-house. Not only had we had several boys and men killed or wounded, but several of the guns were disabled. The one I belonged to had a piece of the muzzle knocked out; and when the ship rolled, it struck a beam of the upper deck with such force as to become jammed and fixed in that position. A twenty-four-pound shot had also passed through the screen of the magazine, immediately over the orifice through which we passed our powder. The schoolmaster received a death wound. The brave boatswain, who came from the sick bay to the din of battle, was fastening a stopper on a back-stay which had been shot away, when his head was smashed to pieces by a cannon-ball; another man, going to complete the unfinished task, was also struck down. Another of our midshipmen also received a severe wound. A fellow named John, who, for some petty offence, had been sent on board as a punishment, was carried past me, wounded. I distinctly heard the large blooddrops fall pat, pat, pat, on the deck; his wounds were mortal. Even a poor goat, kept by the officers for her milk, did not escape the general carnage; her hind legs were shot off, and poor Nan was thrown overboard.

  I have often been asked what were my feelings during this fight. I felt pretty much as I suppose every one does at such a time. That men are without thought when they stand amid the dying and the dead is too absurd an idea to be entertained a moment. We all appeared cheerful, but I know that many a serious thought ran through my mind: still, what could we do but keep up a semblance, at least, of animation? To run from our quarters would have been certain death from the hands of our own officers; to give way to gloom, or to show fear, would do no good, and might brand us with the name of cowards, and ensure certain defeat. Our only true philosophy, therefore, was to make the best of our situation by fighting bravely and cheerfully.

  Although there is no direct evidence of coercion by British officers at Trafalgar, Leech distinctly heard one of the reasons that the men kept at their work on his frigate. ‘A few of the junior midshipmen were stationed below, on the berth deck, with orders, given in our hearing, to shoot any man who attempted to run from his quarters.’ It was a violent and unhappy ship but there were equally violent and disciplinarian captains at Trafalgar. The prospect of instantaneous execution by one’s own officers might well have persuaded the reluctant to fight longer and harder than they otherwise would. There is certainly evidence from Trafalgar of intense loathing between the lower and the quarterdecks. The seaman known as Jack Nastyface, on the Revenge, later told a grisly story:

  We had a midshipman on board our ship of a wickedly mischievous disposition [a more serious accusation in early 19th-century English than nowadays], whose sole delight was to insult the feelings of the seamen, and furnish pretexts to get them punished. His conduct made every man’s life miserable that happened to be under his orders. He was a youth not more than twelve or thirteen years of age; but I have often seen him get on the carriage of a gun, call a man to him and kick him about the thighs and body, and with his fist would beat him about the head; and these, although prime seamen, at the same time dared not murmur. It was ordained however, by Providence, that his reign of terror and severity should not last; for during the engagement, he was killed on the quarter-deck by a grape shot, his body greatly mutilated, his entrails being driven and scattered against the larboard side; nor were there any lamentations for his fate!—No! for when it was known that he was killed, the general exclamation was, ‘Thank God, we are rid of the young tyrant.’

  Here, then, is the amalgam of the British ship-of-the-line going into battle: on the quarter-deck and among the officers of the marines, an overwhelming sense of what needs to be done, of the ‘parts that became them’ in the drama of violence. Zeal, order, honour, love and daring were all aspects of duty, as was the steady doing of violence to the enemy. That is what Nelson’s signal to the men of England had meant. The officers are beautifully dressed, wearing silk stockings and shoes, not the seaboots most of them wore at sea, maintaining the upright stance of men indifferent to terror. Heroism for them was violence phlegmatically done. Collingwood, on the Royal Sovereign, as the shot flew around them, as his men were dying, carefully and elaborately folded up a studding sail, which was hanging over the starboard bulwarks, saying to his first lieutenant that they could not know when they might need it next. Watched by the Spaniards, they stored it away in one of the Royal Sovereign’s boats. On the Belleisle, as her great guns and those on the Fougueux dealt out to each other mutual and dreadful slaughter, Captain Harwood, walking on the quarterdeck, came across John Owen, who was his captain of marines, and offered to share with him a bunch of grapes. The two of them stood on the quarterdeck, watching the battle in which the Fougueux lost her mainmast and mizzenmast and the Belleisle lost all three, eating grapes, discussing the future.

  Around them, on the decks below them and in the rigging above, the men, the people, were acting to different urges. For every £1,000 of prize money which a captain might expect to receive from a captured enemy vessel, the average seaman might receive £2 or £3. That is a measure not of a continuum between the two classes but a chasm, the two sorts of people occupying different mental worlds. The band of brothers did not include the men below. They were below physically, socially and conceptually and their reaction to this air thick with violence was the opposite of the stoical refined silence which honour imposed on the officers. The crews did not contain
the tension but released it by pure aggression and bellowing, some of them even in mid-battle unable to resist poking their ‘heads through an idle port [to see the smoke] bursting forth from the many black iron mouths, and whirling rapidly in thick rings, till it swells into hills and mountains, through which the sharp red tongue of death darts flash after flash. The smoke slowly rolls upwards like a curtain, in awful beauty, and exhibits the glistening water and the hulls of the combatants beneath.’ That seaman, Charles Pemberton, later became a playwright. His memories, recollected in tranquillity, are coloured by a retrospective literariness in a way that Leech’s are not, but still his account of battle seems to describe an engagement with brutalism which is only rarely recorded from warfare but explains much of what happens during it. For Pemberton, quite explicitly battle is a moment of extreme and passionate violence:

  Often we could not see for the smoke, whether we were firing at a foe or friend, and as to hearing, the noise of the guns had so completely made us deaf, that we were obliged to look only to the motions that were made. Sulphur and fire, agony, death and horror, are riding and revelling on the bosom of the sea; yet how gently, brightly playful is its face! To see and hear this! What a maddening of the brain it causes! Yet it is a delirium of joy, a very fury of delight!

  There, in a rare moment of excess, some kind of truth is uttered. For those in the horror of battle, it is not horror but delight, a form of the sublime, a moment in which the collapse and disintegration around them, the excess of energy, finds sudden and explosive release in ‘a very fury of delight.’

  Nelson wanted a conflict that was indescribable, not in the sense of moral revulsion, but as a plain narrative fact. The pell-mell battle, the anarchy in which the individual fighting energies of individual ships and men were released, could not submit to narrative convention. The fleets become their ships, the ships their men, the men their instincts. Decision-making moves from admirals to captains, to gun captains, to the powder-monkeys, the surgeons and their assistants buried in the bloody dark of their cockpits. Life—and death—in Nelsonian battle is atomised, broken into its constituent parts, made to rely not on the large scale manoeuvring of destructive force, but the will to kill and to live. Already, in the first moment of engagement, as Royal Sovereign entered the killing zone, that atomisation had begun. Every ship in all fleets considered that they fought Trafalgar almost entirely on their own. The literal fog of battle threw them in on themselves, a half-blind and in most places nearly fearless frenzy from which the British emerged victors and the French and Spanish destroyed. It was the chaos which Nelson required and which his daring approach had imposed on the enemy.

  Trafalgar, nevertheless, can be seen to have three distinct phases: the first battle between Collingwood’s division and the rear of the Combined Fleet; the long-drawn-out mutual battering between Nelson’s division and the centre of the Combined Fleet; and finally, the battle between the van of the Combined Fleet, which had sailed away from the battle to start with, and a series of individual British ships which, very late in the battle, it had turned to attack. The two conflicting principles of war and of human organisation are apparent in all three phases: fragmentary British aggression, as if the British fleet were an explosive charge, breaking and scattering into tens of equally explosive pieces, coming up against the defensive wall of the Combined Fleet. That wall was inadequate because it was broken from the start, and the detonating elements of British aggression—the individual ships—found their way between the blocks of which it was made, so that their violence did not break like a wave against a seawall, but entered the body of the enemy’s defences and destroyed them from within.

  The leading ships, of all three navies, knew that this was to be a tight, close-range affair. Spanish and French ships had prepared for the battle with grappling irons and extensive training in boarding the enemy which those irons held alongside. Grenades were prepared to be thrown down the enemy hatches from the tops of all three masts. The British had loaded their guns with two or even three shots each: ineffective at long range but delivering multiple killing and splinter-creating blows at short range. Every British ship, and several of the Combined Fleet, were armed with short range, large calibre, deck-mounted guns known as carronades, which were mounted not on a conventional gun carriage but on a pivot and swivel which would allow them to sweep the decks of enemy ships alongside. British crews were also provided with lengths of line, which once they had got deep among the mass of the enemy, they could use to lash the French and Spanish ships to their own, holding them there, not hundreds of yards away, not even a few feet away, but bound to each other, their hulls touching at water level, their yards and bowsprits tangled up high above, so that the enemy could not withdraw from the murderous onslaught of the broadsides which one after another were fired through them and into them. Close to, guns were loaded with reduced powder, to slow down the shot and ensure it remained within the hull of the enemy alongside and didn’t burst through to damage a friendly ship beyond it. Guns on high decks were aimed below the horizontal so that the shot would smash their way downwards through deck after deck. The big guns on the lowest tier were aimed upwards, so that in the enemy ship their shot would erupt through the decks beneath men’s feet, destroying men’s bodies from below. It is as if a boxer, with one hand, was holding the head of his opponent which, with his other, he then bludgeons into submission.

  The intimacy of this battle meant that in some ships the muzzles of the French and English guns touched each other. An average British ship, like the Polyphemus, eighth behind the Royal Sovereign, expended 1,000 24lb shots and 900 18lb shots in the course of the battle, a weight equivalent to 18 tons of cast iron fired at a muzzle velocity capable of killing men and destroying masts at the range of a mile, but here fired into the faces of people six or eight feet away. In many ships, more than 7,000 lbs of gunpowder was used during the engagement. What is extraordinary is not that people died or that ship structures were savaged but that anyone or anything survived.

  That story repeats itself again and again at Trafalgar, beginning at the moment that the Royal Sovereign broke into the Combined line. Collingwood had aimed just astern of the Santa Ana, who had backed her mizzen top-sail to take the way off her. The British ship fired not a shot, apart from one or two to create a curtain of smoke around her, until her guns bore on the Spanish flagship. Collingwood had ordered his guns double-shotted and as they passed under the windows of the stern galleries, the huge, glazed glories of a ship-of-the-line, set in dazzlingly carved and gilded woodwork, the most theatrical, most honourable and in retrospect most absurd aspect of a ship-of-the-line, behind which admirals and captains had their cabins, and providing by far the weakest point in the entire structure, the Royal Sovereign gunners fired one by one, as their guns came to bear.

  Any shot that entered through those galleries would travel the length of the ship on all three of its decks. No bulkheads or transverse timbers would interrupt their flight. They would slaughter without difficulty every creature, human and animal in their path. To achieve this longitudinal devastation of a ship—called since the mid-17th century a ‘raking’—from a position in which no enemy broadside could be brought to bear, was the aim and the ideal of all late-18th-century ship tactics and the moment of the Royal Sovereign’s passing of the Santa Ana, achieved through Nelson’s daring perpendicular approach, was the apotheosis of the killing craft.

  The Santa Ana carried a crew of some 800 officers, marines and men; 240 of them were killed or wounded in the first raking broadside from the Royal Sovereign. If Collingwood’s flagship was travelling at about 2 knots, gliding forward at a rate of about 3 feet a second—in the very light airs, both studding sails and the main—and fore-courses were shaken out; they wanted every bit of speed out of her they could—she would have taken almost exactly a minute to pass under the stern of the Santa Ana. That first minute of Trafalgar devastated the Spaniards, half of them recently swept up from the gutters of Cad
iz. One Spaniard after the battle was found still to be in the Harlequin clothes he had been wearing when taken from the theatre where he had been entertaining the people of Cadiz. During this minute on the Santa Ana they were killed and wounded at a rate of nearly 4 men a second, a screaming, frenzied, terrifying minute, from which there

  would have been no escape, and in which the scenes between decks must have been beyond description.

  On the long approach of the Royal Sovereign, they had scarcely managed to land a single shot on target. The cold silence of the approaching English guns, and the knowledge that this enemy, with such a ruthless reputation, was planning to pass under their desperately vulnerable stern—that can hardly have helped Spanish resolve. Now the Sovereign’s weight of metal plunged through her crew, totally disabling 14 of the Santa Ana’s guns, the full broadside of 50 guns fired once, half of them able to fire again. This was shock and awe. As Collingwood stood on the quarter-deck of his calmly advancing ship, he called out to his captain: ‘Rotherham, what would Nelson give to be here?’ There was delight in battle if battle was like this, in the supremely effective imposition of overwhelmingly damaging force. Two miles away to the northwest, Nelson watched through his telescope from the quarter-deck of Victory: ‘See how that noble fellow Collingwood carries his ship into action’. It was a form of battle he admired too.