In the Hour of Victory

by Sam Willis

  We now know that the size of the Spanish fleet differed from what Jervis believed and consisted of 23 warships.21 Jervis was ignorant of this, however, and attacked anyway. That moment is wonderfully caught in an apocryphal exchange between Calder and Jervis.

  ‘There are eight sail of the line, Sir John.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘There are 20 sail of the line, Sir John.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘There are 25 sail of the line, Sir John.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘There are 27 sail of the line, Sir John ... near twice our own number.’

  ‘Enough, sir,’ exclaimed Jervis. ‘No more of that. The die is cast, and if there are 50 sail I will go through them.’22

  The British attack was bold enough, given what we now know about the size of the opposing fleets, but it was bolder still, given that Jervis believed that he was outnumbered almost two to one, even if the real ratio was nearer three to two. His attack demonstrates powerfully his contempt for Spanish sailors, his belief in British skill and his conviction that a naval victory was crucial. That contempt no doubt stemmed in part from his recent, first-hand experience of the Spaniards’ ability but would have been reinforced by what he saw on the day of the battle itself. As one witness described it, their behaviour was ‘confusion worse confounded’23 and the Master of the Prince George could not see ‘any plan’ in their movements ‘nor did it appear ... there was sufficient skill or discipline to execute any orders their commander might have given’.24

  The third key message that emerges from Jervis’s dispatch is that he mentions that he ‘departed from the regular system’ in his style of attack. In Jervis’s mind there obviously was a ‘regular system’ but we know from studying the tactics employed in previous battles that the shared characteristic of these engagements was variety, not similarity. There were chase battles where the enemy was enveloped from the rear, defensive battles when the fleets stretched the length of each other’s lines and aggressive battles when one fleet divided another. Jervis did nothing unusual or unexpected at St Vincent, so what exactly did he mean by a ‘regular system’?

  The answer lies in the mismatched sizes of the fleets. In such a situation the accepted tactic was for one fleet to stretch the full length of the other until van matched van and rear matched rear. This was the default defensive position assumed when two fleets first met, particularly when the two fleets were unmatched. By stretching the full length of the enemy, Jervis would prevent his enemy from doubling his van or rear. As it was, however, this tactic was inapplicable on this occasion and Jervis, not afraid of the Spanish, saw an extant gap that he could exploit. Only the most incompetent commanding officer in his situation would have overlooked such an obvious opportunity to keep a larger enemy divided. For all of Jervis’s syntax, therefore, it can be argued that he did, in fact, act according to the ‘regular system’ by choosing the appropriate tactic for the given situation. Anything else would have been a fundamental mistake and his contemporaries would have known it.

  Casualty list from the British Fleet, 14 Feb 1797

  The next dispatch is a straightforward list of killed and wounded in the British fleet that gives numbers for the fleet as a whole and the names of the wounded officers.

  Several things stand out. These figures provide an important statistical reminder that, although Nelson’s Captain does have the highest casualty return, his was by no means the only ship in the thick of the action. The Blenheim, Excellent, Prince George and Irresistible all had their fair share of the engagement. We must, however, be careful that we do not fall into a trap here. In the aftermath of The Glorious First of June, Collingwood realised there was a problem with analysing casualty returns. He had fought well but his ship was little damaged and his crew relatively intact. He complained:

  ‘I considered the conduct of the Barfleur had merited commendation when commendation was given to zeal and activity and that any insinuation that either had been wanting was injurious and unjust, nor do I believe any ship was more warmly or effectively engaged than the Barfleur from the beginning of the action to the end of it. That the Frenchmen did not knock our masts away was not my fault.’25

  With limited source material available, the casualty return lists may seem like a good way of judging the performance of the ships in question. However, it does not of course logically follow that the ships with the highest casualty returns were necessarily conducted with greater skill or courage by their captains. It may merely be that the enemy fire had a greater effect on their crews, perhaps because of the enemy gunners’ skill or, equally, through complete chance. The fundamental problem is that we do not know how these men died; it is quite possible that some died from exploding guns, from friendly fire or by falling overboard. Nor do we know why men on other ships did not die in such numbers.

  The return for Jervis’s Victory blows the cobwebs off one apocryphal tale long associated with the battle.26 The story goes that, as Jervis stood viewing the action on his quarterdeck, a shot fizzed through the air inches away and took the head clean off a marine standing beside him, drenching Jervis in his brains. George Grey, the captain of Jervis’s flagship, immediately rushed up to the Admiral to check that he was unharmed and Jervis, with a wonderful sense of calm, replied, ‘I am not at all hurt ... but do, George, try if you can get me an orange.’ The story is certainly plausible. Jervis had for some time been cruising off southern Spain, a land full of over-sized, delicious and juicy oranges and the sang-froid seems pure Jervis. However, the casualty list clearly shows that no marine actually died, only one sailor. It’s a cracking story, so let’s leave it as it is, but change the identity of the victim from a marine to a sailor, poor chap.

  By a curious quirk of fate we also happen to know that, aboard the Orion, was a woman named Nancy Perriam who was serving alongside her husband, a gunner named Edward Hopping. Women were not officially allowed on board naval ships but some captains allowed wives of petty officers to live aboard where they made themselves useful. Nancy normally performed domestic tasks for the captain and officers, and we know she was mending one of Captain Saumarez’s shirts as they approached the Spanish fleet. While in battle she tended the wounded. It is likely, therefore, that the Orion’s wounded midshipman, Thomas Mansel, was nursed by Nancy Perriam, who was also later present at the Battle of the Nile. Perhaps he found a woman’s touch comforting.

  The important name in the list of officers is that of Nelson, who is described as being ‘bruised, but not obliged to quit the Deck’. It was not the first time that Nelson had been wounded in action, but it was the first time that he officially reported a wound. Most recently, his right eye had been damaged in an explosion during an attack on Corsica. He had had no intention of making a fuss and had not filed an unofficial report or even entered the detail into his log. As a result, he was to be prevented from receiving any of the compensation27 he was due when the wound worsened, eventually leaving him blind in that eye.

  This time he was not so casual, though there is still a hint of nonchalance in the description of the wound. He was actually hit in the stomach by a splinter that had burst off a rigging block. He was struck with such force that he collapsed and was caught in the arms of Ralph Miller, Nelson’s captain, who was horrified. Modern surgeons can deduce a good deal from Nelson’s subsequent symptoms. If you are squeamish, look away now. He had been hit so hard that the internal wall of his abdomen split in a great fissure. When he coughed, his intestines spilled out, creating a hernia ‘the size of a fist’ that protruded from his stomach. He described this wound as ‘trifling’. It is unlikely that the hernia became strangulated, that is, cut off from the blood supply in a condition that can kill, because Nelson makes no reference to such trauma. We can therefore deduce that he would have been able to ‘push’ his intestines back in whenever they popped out. We also know that the wound occasionally prevented him from urinating, probably because of swelling of the blad
der wall near the mouth of the urethra, the swelling itself being caused either directly by the blow or, more likely, by resultant bleeding inside the bladder. Blood clots could easily form and thus block the urethra. The symptom would only pass when Nelson passed the clot, a traumatic and painful experience. Nelson was a very private person when it came to such matters and only ever mentioned this symptom once, in a letter to his close friend William Suckling.

  Although Nelson made certain that his wound at St Vincent was officially recorded in the dispatches, he was damned if he was going to tell his wife. He wrote nine letters to Fanny in the aftermath of the battle and didn’t mention his wound once, just as he failed to mention in any letter to Fanny the back wound he had received at Bastia or the eye wound sustained at Corsica. As it was, the stomach wound troubled him for the rest of his life. It is a reminder that it is all too easy to view these figures as cold statistics, when even a non-fatal wound could still be a crushing event that might affect the victim physically and mentally for the rest of his life. Oliver Davis, one of those 50 wounded seamen aboard the Captain, wrote as he lay with a broken arm, ‘I often ... think how uncertain a man’s life is ... I compare it to a flower in the field; in the morning growing and in its full bloom, but before night is cut down and never more seen.’28 This is not just a list of men who had been wounded, but a list of men who had been changed.

  Finally, we can see which British ships were not there. Jervis fought very well against a larger Spanish fleet but his fleet should have been larger by five ships. On 10 December the 74-gun HMS Courageaux was lost on the Barbary Coast along with 464 members of her crew. Eleven days later another 74-gunner, the Bombay Castle, grounded on a sandbar at the mouth of the Tagus and was abandoned, and six days after that, the Second Rate, 98-gun St George was badly damaged when she grounded on the Cachopos Shoals. In the same month the 80-gun Gibraltar and 74-gun Zealous also both grounded, the Gibraltar being forced to return to Britain for repairs and the Zealous to Lisbon. These extra ships might well have turned Jervis’s victory into a rout.

  Casualty List from the Spanish fleet, 14 Feb 1797

  When compared with the British figures, this makes shocking reading. The Spanish fleet lost 15 officers dead, including a flag-officer, and 24 wounded on these four ships alone, the British only six officers killed and 10 injured in their entire fleet. The current and future command structure of the Royal Navy was little affected by the battle, whereas Spain’s was ruined.

  If one considers the numbers as a whole, more than twice as many Spaniards died on these four ships than on the entire British fleet. In the aftermath of Nelson’s capture of the San Nicholas, 144 men lay dead on her decks. There were so many dead in the Spanish fleet that they would have lain in great piles, arms and legs sticking out at impossible angles, heads buried, some of the corpses with eyes open and some with eyes shut. Some lay with weapons still clasped in their hands, others with hands clasped to gaping wounds. The pools of dark blood found their way to the seams between the planks and painted the length of the decks in cruel stripes. This was a massacre caused by far superior gunnery. One contemporary believed that the British fired five or six broadsides to each from the Spanish.

  There is, however, one very important ship missing from this list of captured vessels, the giant four-decked, 136-gun Santissima Trinidad. Howe could have secured more prizes than he did at The Glorious First of June and the same can be said of Jervis who let one of the finest of them all slip through his grasp at St Vincent. The Santissima Trinidad was unique. Built as a three-decker in Havana in 1769, she was converted between 1795 and 1796 to carry 136 guns on four decks. She was the world’s first four-decker and no British sailor had ever seen her like before. British ships fired repeatedly into her hull and at her rigging until she wallowed in the swell with 300 casualties littering her decks. The man who came closest to taking her was James Saumarez of the Orion.

  Saumarez knew fleet battle. As a 24-year-old lieutenant, he had fought against the Dutch at the Dogger Bank in 1781 and the following year had taken part in Rodney’s impressive victory over the French at the Saints. The French had been as poorly manned and dispirited then as the Spanish were now, and the scale of that victory had been equally shocking. Saumarez was always keen for glory and at the Saints had played an important part in capturing the French Admiral’s flagship, the mighty Ville de Paris. He had missed The Glorious First of June but had taken part in a fierce single-ship action, the capture of the frigate La Réunion in October 1793, that was renowned for the scale of the British victory: 120 Frenchmen killed or wounded for only one British sailor hurt. Saumarez went on to fight with Nelson at the Nile but their relationship was never as easy as that between Nelson and some of his other senior officers. He had a thirst for glory at least as great as Nelson’s and they seem to have considered each other a threat to their own advancement.

  There is some confusion in the sources over the fate of the Santissima Trinidad at St Vincent. This is not surprising since to claim such a big fish would have been to secure one’s position in British naval history. Some witnesses claimed that they did not see her strike, others that they did and Saumarez that she struck to him. His Master’s log, at least is clear:

  ‘… we got abreast of the Spanish Admiral, Commander-in-Chief of a four-deck ship, opened a heavy fire on her, as did the Blenheim; both her fore and mizzen masts went over the side being totally disabled. 55 minutes past 4, she struck and hoisted English colours, but we was obliged to abandon her, as several of their 3-deck ships which had been but little in action came down to their assistance, and the day being far spent, we discontinued the action …’29

  Saumarez later became irate at insinuations that he had been mistaken, just as Nelson and his followers became irate that he had been ignored in Jervis’s dispatch. Indeed the absence of credit and lack of detail in Jervis’s dispatch effectively led to a race to self-proclaim that credit among his captains, a race which was handsomely won by Nelson.

  The escape of the Santissima Trinidad reminds us that the Spanish were not sufficiently beaten that they would abandon the pride of their navy, and that several Spanish ships remained in sufficiently good condition to save her. The Santissima Trinidad lived to fight another day and the narrative of St Vincent was dominated by Nelson rather than shared with Saumarez. Things could easily have turned out differently however. A change of wind could have blown the shattered Santissima towards the British fleet or a concerted, combined effort could have wrested her free from her Spanish saviours. Nelson, moreover, was fortunate to have been at the battle at all; he had rejoined the fleet only 17 hours before. The results of fleet battle were malleable and easily changed. As it was, the battle provided an important foundation for the Nelson myth that eventually led to his statue being raised in granite 100 feet above Trafalgar Square. The dispatches remind us of the ghosts that surround him on invisible pillars of their own.

  Admiral John Jervis became Baron Jervis of Meaford and the Earl of St Vincent, a title he disliked because he believed that it lacked modesty. Jervis would have preferred Yarmouth because of his personal links there, but the final choice lay with the King who insisted on St Vincent. Nelson chose to become a Knight of the Bath rather than a Baronet like the rest of the junior flag-officers, because the title came with a gaudy star and shiny ribbon that he could wear on his uniform.

  The Spanish sailors were roundly chastised for their performance. There was no attempt to conjure victory from defeat as there had been in France after The Glorious First of June. Córdoba and his officers were pilloried for inefficiency, misguidance, incompetence and a lack of honour. Córdoba was sacked and banished from royal and political favour and five of his captains were suspended. The dregs of Córdoba’s fleet returned to Cadiz where they were blockaded with great success. Jervis proudly declared to Nepean that the blockade was ‘the compleatist thing in Naval History’.30 In June, he wrote to his brother with nothing short of glee that he had been ‘
riding triumphant one hundred and seven days in the entrance to the Port’.31

  The Spanish navy lost any position of favour it may have enjoyed in the royal court and government and its strength was sapped as the political focus waned. Of a formidable fleet of 75 warships in 1791, only 53 remained by 1802 and only 20 of those were seaworthy. The likelihood of an invasion launched by combined Franco-Spanish seapower evaporated. The British regained the faith in their navy they had lost in 1796. That navy had now fought two opponents, the French in the summer of 1794 and the Spanish in the new year of 1797, and had beaten them both. Unfortunately for the British, however, just as the Franco-Spanish threat from the south and west receded, so a new threat appeared from the east. It was now the turn of the Dutch, so recently a willing member of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France, to change sides.

  The British had won momentum at St Vincent but they now faced two major problems. The first was that the Royal Navy was rotten in its core. A matter of weeks after news of St Vincent had arrived, the navy suffered two crippling mutinies, one at Spithead, the other at the Nore. The second problem was the Dutch. When Howe had fought the French at The First of June there had been a convincing, albeit distant, history of decisive fleet victories over his opponents. So too with Jervis and the Spanish, but the Dutch were an altogether different proposition. The most recent action with them had been at the Dogger Bank in 1781 and that had been a real tussle; no ships were captured and the British suffered nearly as many casualties as their foe. Long before then, the British and Dutch had repeatedly locked horns in some of the longest and fiercest battles of the Age of Sail during the Dutch Wars of the 17th century. There was history between these two great maritime nations and that history was far from encouraging for any British fleet, let alone one that was crippled by mutiny.