Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  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 grea
t 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 gundeck, 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 19thcentury 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: