In the Hour of Victory

by Sam Willis

  BRITISH COURT MARTIALS:

  None. But there could have been several

  DISPATCHES CARRIED HOME BY:

  Lieutenant John Lapenotiere

  The Relics

  More relics survive from Trafalgar than from any other naval battle of the age of sail. Such a crushing victory, achieved at the loss of such a cherished naval officer, created a unique atmosphere in the battle’s aftermath. The participants realised that they had been part of something special. Although we are missing so many of the mundane, everyday objects of naval life from that day in October 1805, countless objects with special significance were squirrelled and swiped, coveted and cherished, hidden and stored. The very fabric of the ships was turned into mementos, from writing desks to paper weights, from picture frames to chairs. Meanwhile, an endless array of manufactured souvenirs including cups, glasses, plates, soup tureens and clocks was produced to satisfy the enduring interest in the battle and its lessons for history.

  The bicentenary of Trafalgar in 2005 demonstrated with unmistakable force the place of the battle in the cultural identities of the main participant nations and in the global perception of naval history. That interest has in turn been reflected in the careful collection, cataloguing and preservation of the relics. While some items, such as the Union Flag of the Spartiate, are in the hands of private collectors, and kept in unknown environmental conditions and unknown locations, hundreds of other relics are maintained by professional curators in national institutions where their continued existence is more likely to be guaranteed further into the future. When faced with the task of selecting a favourite Trafalgar relic, therefore, we are in the curious position of having to choose from an embarrassment of riches.

  Something large? Well, there is nothing bigger or more impressive than HMS Victory herself, now restored immaculately to her 1805 appearance. She watches the world watching her from a Portsmouth dry dock where, in 1941, she was narrowly missed by a Luftwaffe bomb. To this day she remains in commission as the flagship of the Second Sea Lord. An astute observer would notice that the one thing that differs from her operational appearance is a lack of canvas on her yards. However, preserved and displayed in a building nearby is the very topsail that hung from her foretopsail yard at Trafalgar. Large? You have to see it to believe it. It is 54 feet deep, measures 84 feet at its base and covers an area of 3,618 square feet. That is a third larger than a doubles tennis court; a little more than two volleyball courts; five and a half cricket pitches; or, in nautical terms, roughly the same size as the entire sail area of an average Elizabethan warship.

  Something atmospheric? Let’s stay with that topsail. HMS Victory is impressive for her size and scale but she is too highly polished to bring one to the heart of battle. Her topsail, however, is extraordinarily powerful for its sense of history. The darkened room in which it is displayed has a unique atmosphere, the sail itself a power of its own, infused with a creeping sense of dread. The shot holes and tears caused by French and Spanish cannon and muskets are quite shocking. Nelson’s uniform, at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, shares many of these characteristics: in the left shoulder of his coat, just below the epaulette, we see the hole made by the bullet that killed him; on his stockings we see the blood of his dead secretary that had collected in a pool by Nelson’s feet; up the front of his trousers we see a jagged tear where they were cut from the paralysed legs of the dying admiral.

  A weapon perhaps? A cannon-ball was removed from the hull of HMS Victory and is preserved in Greenwich along with numerous swords and pistols. The French officers’ swords are particularly attractive with their distinctive curved shape.

  Something that makes a noise to evoke the sound of Trafalgar? Then the boatswain’s call from the 100-gun Britannia is for you, speaking the language of shrills and peeps that moved sailors hither and thither as surely as a bellowed command.

  Or something a little creepy? Nelson’s pigtail, cut shortly after he died, still survives (fig. 16) and so too does a miniature coffin, made from the wood of his own coffin. While for those who like a mystery or appreciate the humour in desperate attempts to associate something, anything, with the battle, there is a shoe buckle, preserved in a wooden box in Greenwich which, in the official words of the Maritime Museum, ‘might’ have come from Nelson’s cabin. But then again, of course, it might not.

  So what on earth happened off Cape Trafalgar that a British national institution is prepared to spend public money on the time and space to curate a shoe buckle that might, or might not, have been in Nelson’s cabin, and why is a warship launched in 1765 still in commission in the Royal Navy? Anyone would think we were mad.

  The Mismatch

  One of the first things to appreciate about Trafalgar is the length of time that appears to have passed since the previous major engagement. In this collection of dispatches, the preceding battle is the Battle of Copenhagen, fought on 2 April 1801, four years, six months and 19 days before Trafalgar. Copenhagen, however, was fought against the Danes, so it would seem the last time that the British had fought the French was at the Nile on 1 August 1798. That was seven years, two months and 20 days before Trafalgar, easily long enough for Nelson to have put on a bit of weight which is noticeable in the changed cut of his surviving uniforms. Moreover, the last time that the British had fought the Spanish, at the Battle of St Vincent on Valentine’s Day 1797, was even more distant at eight years, eight months and a week earlier.

  This chronology is misleading, however. There were interim engagements, some of them British victories, which are not included in this magnificent collection of dispatches: an engagement with the French at Algeciras on 6 July 1801; one with the French and Spanish in the Gut of Gibraltar on 12 July 1801; and a further engagement with the French and Spanish off Ferrol on 22 July 1805. Nor were these mere minor skirmishes; the engagement in the Gut of Gibraltar in 1801 led to the destruction of two huge enemy First Rates and the capture of a further 74-gunner.13 Yet the scale of the British victories in the preceding decade ensured that these relatively minor battles would not be included in this collection.

  Nonetheless, a significant period of time had passed since the last great, decisive battle between the British, the French and the Spanish, and it had been more than enough time both for the French and the Spanish to rebuild their fleets and for the British to lose their way in this sustained maritime marathon.

  What, then, were the conditions of the combatants in the autumn of 1805? It is in the British fleet that the change is most surprising. Pitt’s extraordinarily long term of office ended just before the Battle of Copenhagen. Addington, his successor, representing the vociferous voters who were so fed up with the war, began to make diplomatic moves towards peace even as Hyde Parker and his fleet set sail on their aggressive mission to the Baltic. Another of Addington’s early decisions had been to replace Lord Spencer with St Vincent – the former John Jervis, admiral at the Battle of Cape St Vincent – as First Lord of the Admiralty. St Vincent had an impressive fighting record but his perception of right and wrong, of mutiny and obedience and of efficiency and corruption was ill-suited to the political subtleties demanded of the First Lord.

  One of the tasks that St Vincent ploughed into was reform of the Royal Dockyards. For generations, the dockyards had produced impressive results, despite the ill-regulated and corrupt way in which they were run. St Vincent, however, had had enough. He wanted greater efficiency and he wanted to root out corruption. Fine ideals for an administrator though these may have been, St Vincent’s approach, which brought ‘sea’ discipline to what he saw as the undisciplined hoards of idle dockies, was deeply resented and very harmful to the navy. Within two years he had reduced the yards’ workforce by a fifth and severely damaged their efficiency. The cessation of hostilities following the Treaty of Amiens also gave the politicians the opportunity to save money and, in 1803, they cut the navy’s budget by 27 per cent. Even in 1804, when it was becoming clear that Napoleon’s peace overtures
were fraudulent, naval funding was still significantly lower than it had been in 1802. This combination of St Vincent’s witch-hunt for corruption and economic belt-tightening meant that, when war broke out again in May 1803, many British ships were old and weak.

  Napoleon, however, was as dangerous as ever. Thousands of French troops now lined the cliffs of northern France whilst shipwrights laboured on a vast flotilla of landing craft. The paralysing fear of invasion, which had disappeared after the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, returned with a vengeance. The British were desperate to solve the problem posed by their crumbling fleet. Their saviour was Gabriel Snodgrass, who designed a way of strengthening elderly and weak ships with a system of diagonal bracing. The British fleet of ghost ships was, temporarily at least, resurrected. In the months before Trafalgar, 22 line-of-battle ships and 11 frigates were braced and given additional three-inch planking to increase their sheer strength. It was a timely intervention because, in 1803, Napoleon forced the Spanish into another alliance and, in December 1804, they declared war on Britain. The Royal Navy now had to contend with French fleets from Brest, Rochefort, L’Orient and Toulon, together with Spanish fleets from Cadiz, El Ferrol, Cartagena and Havana. Combined, the French and Spanish far outnumbered the British.

  Much had changed in the years since the first naval battle of the Revolutionary Wars but 1805 shared a number of important characteristics with 1794. Then, Robespierre had ruled France with absolute authority; a decade later Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor. Both men had believed that the future of France, and the security of their own political position, lay in the prosecution of an aggressive foreign policy. Unfortunately for Napoleon, however, neither the French nor the Spanish had solved any of the significant organisational problems that continued to plague their navies.

  The most basic challenge was that neither country was able to raise the same amount of money, or honour the same level of debt, as the British, whose economy was strongly supported by the growing empire which Britain had secured through its maritime trade. There were also further problems of naval logistics. British dockyards and dockyard technology, despite the problems just recounted, were far superior to those of the Spanish and French. Put simply, the British could cope with the increasing demands of naval warfare by producing excellent ships at a faster rate than anyone else and they could man them with sufficient experienced sailors to operate them effectively. The French could produce ships quickly, but they were inferior to the British, weak and with thin hulls. The Spanish had magnificent ships but they still did not have sufficient experienced sailors to crew them. Their problems had been exacerbated by the losses sustained at the Battle of St Vincent so that, when they fought at Trafalgar, almost half of their men were not seamen. The French also suffered from a lack of experienced fighting sailors, an inherent problem not helped by their significant losses at The Glorious First of June and the Nile. Making matters worse for both the French and the Spanish, in 1805 both fleets were suffering from viral sickness and scurvy and hence from plummeting morale.

  The British crews, in contrast, were adequate, experienced, well-trained and healthy. The British fleets had blockaded their enemies’ ports, denying them access to the fresh food that could make them strong whilst exploiting their own control of the sea lanes to keep the British fleet well stocked. The British sailors also had their confidence bolstered by an uninterrupted series of five significant naval victories. Any future contest between the two fleets would be unequal and everybody knew it. To make matters worse for the French and Spanish, Horatio Nelson, the man who disdained their seamanship and fighting skill more than any other, was in command of the fleet sent to destroy them.

  The Cripple’s Friend

  The Trafalgar dispatches are unique in that none of the letters is written by the fleet’s commander-in-chief. When considering command of the British fleet, we must therefore consider both Nelson and his second-in-command, Collingwood.

  Nelson’s career had been resurrected in the aftermath of Copenhagen, though his superiors remained anxious to keep him at sea and away from personal and political intrigue. On his return from the Baltic, he was immediately given command of the anti-invasion forces in the Channel and he used the opportunity to launch an attack on the fleet of landing craft moored at Boulogne. There was little glamour in the operation, however, and it was rendered insignificant by the subsequent Peace of Amiens.

  Nelson spent the following weeks of peace settling into his new home, Merton Place in Surrey. During this time Emma Hamilton turned the house into a shrine to her lover, ‘cramming Nelson with trowelfuls of flattery, which he goes on taking as quietly as a child does pap’.1 Portraits, battle scenes and mementos littered the house, among them, of course, the lightning conductor from L’Orient, the French flagship destroyed at the Nile (p. 159). Yet, although this period of home life and his association with Emma did nothing to enhance Nelson’s personal reputation, his professional stature remained unrivalled. Moreover his fame was beginning to reach extraordinary levels, fuelled by the combination of his physical frailty and the strength of his character. He had survived the Battle of Copenhagen unscathed but when he arrived to take command of the fleet off Cadiz on 28 September 1805, he was, in modern terms, disabled. Indeed, it has been calculated that he would have received a total degree of disablement at 140 per cent if assessed for a war pension today. We know that his mind had wandered to his physical state during the Peace, because he wrote a few lines that encapsulate perfectly his curious mixture of weakness, strength, sacrifice, self-absorption, understatement and indifference. He listed his wounds in the third person, as if describing somebody else, but was careful to include his title:

  WOUNDS RECEIVED BY LORD NELSON

  His Eye in Corsica

  His Belly off Cape St Vincent

  His Arm at Teneriffe

  His Head in Egypt

  He then added, ruefully, ‘Tolerable for one war’.2

  One man who knew the peculiarities of Nelson’s character as well as anyone was Cuthbert Collingwood. The son of a Northumbrian merchant, Collingwood joined the navy at the tender age of 11. By 1805, he had known Nelson for 32 years and they had become fast friends. For all of their personal closeness, however, their command styles were notably different. Collingwood was easy on his men but cold with them too, a direct contrast with Nelson’s warmth and his encouragement of friendship among his officers. Just a few weeks before Trafalgar, Nelson encouraged his squadron to knit together through constant contact and interplay. Collingwood, meanwhile, ‘ … never invite[d] any one to his table, nor will he allow us to visit each other’.3 It is an important point which reminds us that command style was never taught or in any way regulated. Where Nelson could adopt one style, which was clearly beneficial to fleet efficiency, an admiral such as Collingwood, a close friend of Nelson who had witnessed his success, could adopt a very different approach. It is one of the main reasons why British naval command competence did not improve steadily over time; lessons were not learnt.

  In one important respect, however, Collingwood had learnt from his past and he was determined not to repeat the mistake made by Howe at The Glorious First of June in 1794. Then, Collingwood, as flag captain of the Barfleur, had assumed command early in the battle when his commanding officer, Rear- Admiral George Bowyer, was wounded. When other officers enjoyed Howe’s official thanks in the subsequent dispatch, and eventually received gold medals, Collingwood was ignored (pp. 51–2). He found the entire episode insulting and distressing and it made him particularly sensitive to his own subordinates’ expectations. Collingwood was thus keenly aware of the need to acknowledge their contributions and that sensitivity had a significant impact on how the news of Trafalgar was received both by the contemporary public and by subsequent generations of historians.

  The Desperado

  By October 1805, Napoleon was exasperated with his navy and, in particular, with the commander of the Toulon fleet, the man who had had the good fo
rtune to escape the carnage of the Battle of the Nile (p. 196) and who rejoiced in the multi-barrelled name of Vice-Admiral Pierre-Charles-Jean-Baptiste-Silvestre de Villeneuve. Through no fault of his own, Villeneuve had failed to realise Napoleon’s ambition of invading England. Indeed he had failed to provide the necessary maritime foundations for any of Napoleon’s eight invasion plans, none of which had been based on any realistic maritime objectives. Napoleon had by now cast his invasion plans aside. The Grand Armée had struck camp, abandoning the cliffs of the Pas-de-Calais, and had marched on Austria. A dispirited and hungry French fleet, which had just been chased halfway round the world by Nelson, lay in Cadiz alongside a sickly Spanish fleet, while Collingwood cruised off shore keeping watch. As soon as the location of the combined fleet was discovered, Nelson was summoned from Merton and sailed to join Collingwood and assume command.

  Napoleon, meanwhile, had issued orders for the Allied fleet to transport troops to the Mediterranean to assist in his defence of Naples against an Anglo-Russian expedition. At the same time he sent Vice-Admiral François Rosily to replace Villeneuve. News of Rosily’s imminent arrival reached Cadiz just as Rosily himself reached Madrid; deducing Napoleon’s intention, Villeneuve was hurt, and the pride of this honourable officer had now been bruised once too often.

  As soon as he arrived, Nelson took his fleet well out of sight of Cadiz. This was no attempt to hide; a fleet of 27 ships was far too large to be missed by allied scouts or by the net of fishing vessels and merchant ships that continually poured in and out of Cadiz harbour. With orders to take the fleet to Naples and also to stand himself down, Villeneuve sat in Cadiz, knowing full well that Nelson and his powerful fleet was waiting over the horizon. It was a golden opportunity to defy Napoleon’s perception of him and his navy. This was an age in which personal reputation and honour moved men as surely as orders. In spite of a vote in a council of war held on 8 October that he should stay in Cadiz and meekly hand over his command, Villeneuve gave the order to raise anchor.4 Thousands of people crowded the magnificent stone walls of Cadiz to watch the fleet, 33 strong, sail out to battle. And they did so in absolute silence.