Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  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 allabsorbing 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 makedo 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 mere
ly 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 re-take 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 coolheaded 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.