Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  Those are deeply affectionate and understanding words, embracing the contradictions of the systematic-irrational, humane-violent, intolerant-generous, powerful-suffering hero whom he worshipped. As Victory’s bowsprit came across the stern of the Bucentaure, Collingwood would have seen nothing of it. He was already deep into the smoke and fire of his own battle a mile to the south. But he would have known what was about to happen.

  The wind has dropped, the studding sails have been shot away, the others are like sieves or riddles, and Victory slows to the point of encounter. The slight bowing of the allied line, to north and south of her, allows both broadsides to be fired with advantage before she breaks through it. As the guns fire, it is as if the air is sucked out from between decks. Every apocalyptic vision the men have heard or dreamed of starts to become real.

  The one was cloth’d in flames of fire,

  The other cloth’d in iron wire,

  The other cloth’d in tears and sighs

  Dazzling bright before my eyes.

  The whole ship, in its massive timbers, shudders with the reverberations of the 100 guns. Then the starboard bow of Victory collides with the Redoutable and Victory’s forecastle is astern of the Bucentaure. The French flagship is so close that if there were more of a wind the great French ensign hanging from the peak of her spanker, her aftmost sail, could have been snatched at by men on the deck of Victory. As it is, the Victory rolls in the swell coming under her and the main yard-arm on the port side just touches the vangs on the Frenchman’s gaff—the system of lines holding up the spar to which the spanker is bent. That close, intimate brushing of the enemy—with its strangely erotic undertones of initial, stroking seduction—is what Nelson had in mind. It is the Nelson Touch.

  Then the necessary murder: on Victory’s forecastle, one on each side, is a pair of huge 68-pounder carronades. They are loaded with a single large calibre roundshot and a canister of 500 musket balls. The portside carronade is fired straight into the stern windows of the Bucentaure and its charge travels the length of the gundecks in the French flagship: a single avenging destroyer followed by its cloud of disciples. One by one, as they come to bear, the 50 guns of the Victory’s port broadside then fire, double-shotted, down the same open alleyway. The metal shot, each 61/4 inches wide, ricochet through the men and guns that lie in their way, a bowling arcade in which the bowls do their work on the nine-pin Frenchmen. Twenty of the great guns on Bucentaure, each weighing nearly three tons, are turned over and made useless. The condition of the people can scarcely be imagined. Afterwards, British officers saw the bodies lying on those gundecks, many of them strangely beheaded by the passing shot. What the Royal Sovereign had done to the Santa Ana, the Victory is now doing to her French counterpart. The dust from the Bucentaure’s smashed woodwork settles on the shoulders of Nelson and Hardy. Black smoke from the broadside rolls back into the gundecks on Victory where each gun has burning beside it a lantern to illuminate the darkness of battle. Hundreds of men on the Bucentaure had been killed or wounded in the two minutes Victory had taken to sail past her. They listened for the crash made by their shot ‘with characteristic avidity’.

  In front of them now, and to the right, the French Neptune, 80 guns, opened fire on the Victory’s bow. Damage everywhere; splinters the size of pick-axe handles flying across the deck; the foremast ‘wounded’; the bowsprit hit and the yards carrying the spritsails that were hung from it shot away. The weak structure at the bows of the ship takes a series of roundshot, each one slicing into the smoke-filled spaces between decks. These are the moments in which the Victory has more men killed than at any other. Their bodies are thrown over and, as Turner would later quite accurately paint it, the sea becomes coloured with their blood, the Atlantic turned murky with its stain. In other ships, the blood is seen running from the scuppers, down the topsides, streaking the paintwork.

  Hardy, meanwhile, ordered Victory to starboard, towards the Redoutable. Instructions are shouted down to the men at the tiller ropes, and the flagship begins her slow turn around the bow of the Redoutable. A broadside was poured into her as Victory crossed her bows. The Redoutable fired back, took some shots at the British Téméraire which had followed Victory into battle, and then, to the consternation of the British, closed most of her lower deck gunports, presenting an almost blank, unarmed face to the enemy. Jean-Jacques Lucas, her tiny, fierce captain, had decided to confront the British not with the great guns but with musketry. The ports were closed to prevent the British boarding through them. Within a minute or two, the Victory and the Redoutable lay alongside each other. The British gunners kept at their work, unable to run the guns out through their ports as the hull of the Redoutable walled them in. They fired from within the Victory’s own decks, where the black smoke made nothing visible. Where they could, they fired through those of the Redoutable’s ports that were open, destroying Frenchmen down the length of a dining-room table. If not for one peculiar bit of luck, the effect of Victory’s broadsides might, through sheer Newtonian physics, have driven the two ships apart. By chance, though, Victory’s starboard fore topmast studding sail boom iron—the metal fixing holding the boom on to which the fair-weather sail to starboard of Victory’s topsail was bent—caught in the side of the Redoutable’s foretopsail. It was enough, in the very light airs, to hold the ships together and, together with the grappling hooks which the Redoutable threw across to Victory, that small piece of forged iron created the conditions in which Nelson died.

  The killing continued. The carronade on the starboard side of the Victory’s forecastle had not been fired. Now it surveyed, with its terrifying mouth, the open upper deck of the Redoutable. The Victory’s boatswain, using the carronade, loaded with canisters of musket balls and hugely heavy single shots, swept the gangways clean of living Frenchmen. Life was not sustainable there.

  Meanwhile, of course, Captain Lucas of the Redoutable had his response. The guns on his maindeck were now being fired into the Victory. Muskets were being shot through some of their gunports into the gunports of the enemy, obliterating the Englishmen working at the great guns only a few feet away. But Lucas had also placed men with muskets in the ‘tops’—solid wooden platforms on each of the three masts, set some 30 feet above the deck. They were substantial structures: a musket ball fired from below would not penetrate them and so musketmen in the tops could shield themselves from British fire with the timbers on which they stood. In the main and fore tops, small brass mortars called ‘cohorns’, filled with odds and ends of mankilling metal called ‘langridge’—a piece of which had struck Nelson on the forehead during the Battle of the Nile, exposing a section of skull one inch wide and three inches long—were sweeping Victory’s forecastle.

  It was a killing game, and, because of the nature of the projectiles, bound to be a long one. Explosive shells had been in use in naval warfare since the 17th century; Colonel William Congreve, working at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, had developed explosive rockets; and there were explosive mines and explosive grenades. Nevertheless, established naval opinion was for the moment largely against them. The Redoutable was equipped with grenades, which men in the tops and the rigging threw down on to the the British decks and through the hatchways. Despite that, the central armament of the fleet was inert metal, in the form of the musket ball, the canister, grape shot or roundshot. None could, in itself and singly, destroy or disable a ship, as an explosive round would have done. Damage could only be cumulative, and victory in pre-explosive battle was achieved either by the imposition of a huge concentration of firepower in a short time in a confined space; or, between more equally matched opponents, in a simple slugging match. The ships were very nearly unsinkable, unless their magazines caught fire and they exploded. Ships could continue to float and fight even when their hulls and rigging were largely destroyed. A battle was won only if so much damage was inflicted on the enemy’s people that they could no longer fire back.

  Speed of repeat firing became the key. As in draug
hts, the more you were winning, the more you were likely to win. It was nearly impossible to claw your way back from a losing position. It was a question, as in business, of trends. A small advantage, slowly opening, would in the end bring you victory. If one set of gun crews could fire faster than the other; or if they could begin, as Victory had, with a devastating initial attack, it was difficult for the enemy to catch up. Once behind, the gun crews—the heaviest guns needed 14 men each—would be broken apart by the incoming cannonades. Every time they attempted to reorganise, the next broadside would again destroy them. It was a task for Sisyphus.

  British gun-training insisted that every man in each gun crew should be able to perform every task in the elaborate, dangerous heavyweight ballet of loading, firing, cleaning and reloading a gun. That was more rarely the case among the French and Spanish, but at least the defensive thickness of the hulls, and the presence behind them of officers who would shoot them if they deserted their posts, meant that losing crews did not instantly surrender. A certain amount of time was needed before a decision would emerge. That moment—marked by the silence of the guns—was when the beaten ship should strike her flag. This was not maniacal berserker battle: to continue with slaughter when it had become obvious there would be no other outcome, was a mark of inhumanity, not courage. Nearly always there was a precise moment at which the battle was turned from on to off. Until that moment the duty was to reply to their guns with yours. After fighting a Frenchman to a standstill at the Glorious First of June in 1794, and having completely silenced her, the Honourable Thomas Pakenham, younger son of the Earl of Longford, famously hailed her through a speaking trumpet with a string of oaths:

  ‘-,—, you! Have you surrendered?’ Back came a faint reply, ‘Non, Monsieur.’ Then he thundered, aggrieved to the very soul, ‘Why the—don’t you go on firing?’

  These technological boundaries established the moral terms of battle. You could not dash in and out, to deliver a killer punch and then retire. If you were to win you had, in the word they used, to ‘engage’. You had to stay there in close proximity to their killing power for a certain length of time until you had overcome them or they had overcome you. If you wanted to shorten this time, and kill more of them more quickly than your great guns were achieving, you could board an enemy, and kill them in hand-to-hand fighting, which if successful could bring an instant result. That was a tactical variation. The essence remained the same: kill enough of the enemy for them to surrender. You could then take their ship as a prize, which would make you rich.

  The effect of this was to create a battle environment in which the humanity of the combatants—their reality as people—was the guiding principle at work. A nonexplosive technology which was effective only at short range; and an ideology of honour, which insisted on the exposure of the commander to the greatest danger: that combination made battle intimate, and ensured that the faces of the enemy were visible. And that in turn shaped the way in which the battle was conceived, described and remembered.

  This is both the most important and the most unexpected aspect of Trafalgar. Nowhere does this fleet’s 18th-century inheritance become more obvious. The preceding hundred years had seen a revolution in the English sense of humanity. The 17th century had understood man essentially in relationship to God. The 19th century would agonise over the fate of his individual self. The 18th century in England saw man’s existence neither in those abject metaphysical terms nor in the lonely isolation of the romantic soul but as essentially social, engaged with others, part of a society which gave his life meaning. God himself in this 18thcentury vision was social. He had created man to be social and social sympathy was at the heart of humanity. Human togetherness was what made life worth living, and nothing was more conducive to happiness—a key 18th-century word, which had meant nearly nothing to 17th-century puritans, and would be abandoned by the Romantics as inherently suspect. As William Hutton, the free commercial thinker and bookseller in Birmingham, wrote in 1781:

  For the intercourse occasioned by traffic gives a man a view of the world and of himself; removes the narrow limits that confine his judgment; expands the mind; opens his understanding; removes his prejudices; and polishes his manners. Civility and humanity are ever the companions of trade; the man of trade is the man of liberal sentiment; a barbarous and commercial people is a contradiction.

  These are, of course, the ideas on which Adam Smith drew. Sociability, never more than when in the service of commerce, was goodness. Virtue was no lonely thing, as it had been for the puritan. It was a full and generous humanity, an acceptance of the human reality of other people and a duty of benevolence among men. Burke thought solitude ‘as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived’ and that sense of the need for a shared humanity is powerfully in play at Trafalgar. The events that followed the opening of the battle on the quarterdeck of Victory, and after that deep below in the dark of her cockpit, as well of course as on other ships, are described with an intense focus on the men involved, on their reality as people. There is, in those descriptions, quite clearly an appetite not only for glory but for sympathy. The way in which people are seen to die at Trafalgar is in fact more pathetic than heroic, more an appeal to the human heart than to an admiration for the achievements of the great. It is one of the paradoxes of heroism that a sense of humanity is one of its essential components. What, in the end, would Nelson be without humanity? As cold and admired as the Duke of Wellington.

  Much has always been made of the Christ-like analogies of Nelson’s death: the suffering, the sacrifice, the acknowledged fate, the period in the tomb, the rise to glory. That element is undoubtedly there, not least in Nelson’s own mind. He knew, and had discussed with the American painter Benjamin West, the great picture West had made in 1770 of General Wolfe dying at Quebec during the Seven Years War. West’s masterpiece portrayed Wolfe quite openly in the visual terms which painters had used since the Middle Ages to depict Christ as he was brought down from the Cross: the pale skin, the dead body slumped in the arms of the acolytes around him, the light falling on the central scene, the sense of dark and apocalyptic violence behind, the central grieving, the shock and honour of the moment, the tall Union flag, or King’s Colour, half-furled so that in the composition it plays the part of the Cross itself.

  When Nelson had gone with the Hamiltons to Fonthill, William Beckford’s medievalist fantasy abbey, for Christmas in December 1800, Benjamin West, then President of the Royal Academy, was among the other guests. He and Nelson spoke. The vice-admiral confessed he knew little about art:

  But he said, turning to West, ‘there is one picture whose power I do feel. I never pass a print shop where your “Death of Wolfe” is in the window, without being stopped by it.’ West of course made his acknowledgements, and Nelson went on to ask why he had painted no more like it. ‘Because, my lord, there are no more subjects.’ ‘Damn it,’ said the sailor, ‘I didn’t think of that,’ and asked him to take a glass of champagne. ‘But, my lord, I fear your intrepidity will yet furnish me with such another scene; and if it should, I shall certainly avail myself of it.’ ‘Will you?’ replied Nelson, pouring out bumpers, and touching his glass violently against West’s—‘will you, Mr West. Then I shall hope that I shall die in the next battle.’

  Perhaps the story is not entirely to be trusted. It was only written down late into the 19th century and Nelson, in the bumper-filling exchanges, sounds too much like a joshing, stupid military man for the incident to ring quite true. But in the opening remark you can hear his finer voice, the voice of his letters: ‘There is one picture whose power I do feel.’ That sounds like Nelson, as does the straightforward admission that he knows it from reproductions in shop windows. Several engravings were made, many of them bearing the rubric: ‘The hero is dying at the very moment he has won a continent for the Anglo-Saxon race’—a pre-figuring of Trafalgar of which the imperialist Nelson-Wolfe-Christ was apparently entirely conscious.

  There are subtle and importan
t distinctions to be made here. West’s Death of Wolfe was so greatly admired not because it was a portrait of a hero; nor because it demonstrated triumph; nor, overtly anyway, because it mimicked the moment of Christ’s death; but because it made heroism social. Wolfe is shown as a slight and fading figure. He is an anti-Hercules, neither a strong nor a beautiful man. He might have wandered in from administering an estate somewhere in the English Midlands, the sort of figure Gainsborough would have painted, regarding the acres he was so carefully improving, his hand stroking the muzzle of his dog. Wolfe is ordinariness itself and West’s picture shows sacrifice, valour, honour, courage and death emerging from that ordinariness, as part of the global-scale enterprise on which the humane and social civilisation of the Anglo-Saxons was embarked. West caught the moment because he had translated heroism into the realm of the humane. That model of the modern death is what shaped both Nelson’s enacting and the later telling of his own death at Trafalgar. It was not the death of a god; it was the death of a man.

  In all accounts of Trafalgar, even from the beginning, the method of the story now becomes slow and intimate. The scene draws on the great slow deaths: of Jesus, of Arthur, perhaps even of Socrates. In unrelieved close-up, England was invited to watch the dignified, anxious and intensely moving humanity of Nelson in his final hours. That knowledge of the man, naked in his humanity, surrounded by the men he loved and who loved him, deeply embedded in the social reality of an England which he loved, marked him out as a hero. One of the great paradoxes of Trafalgar is that, for all its unbridled violence, it can be seen in the end as a deeply humane event.

  A few minutes after 1 o’clock that afternoon, the slight figure of Nelson was walking alongside the huge bulk of Captain Hardy, taller, broader, fatter, taking their ‘customary promenade’ on the quarterdeck. Almost everything is known about the moment. Their walk to and fro, as the battle raged, was 21 feet each way. At the after end, they turned just in front of the smashed stanchions of the Victory’s wheel. At the forward end, they turned by the combings of the cabin ladder-way—the rail around the steps down to the Commander-in-Chief’s quarters. There is some doubt whether they were walking on the starboard side of it, nearer the Redoutable, as was usual for flag officers on a quarterdeck, or on the port side. Whichever it was, at about 1.15, they were within one pace of the ladder-way combings. Hardy took the extra step, but as he did so, Nelson suddenly spun around to his left. Hardy, now one step away, turned to see him in the act of falling. Nelson fell on his knees, with his left hand, his only hand, just touching the deck, holding him up for a moment. Then the arm gave way, and Nelson fell on to his left side, just at the point where John Scott, his secretary, had been killed. Nelson’s clothes, in Surgeon William Beatty’s euphemistic phrase, ‘were much soiled’ with Scott’s blood. Translated into a modern idiom, that can only mean Nelson was drenched in it. The stains of Scott’s blood can still be seen on the sleeve and the tails of Nelson’s coat, now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.