Nelson
Page 90
But even this failed to meet the emergency that was developing. Had Jervis’s rear division strictly responded it would still have wasted precious minutes proceeding in the wrong direction before tacking at the new turning place. As it was it did not even do that. For some reason the officers on the Britannia missed the commander-in-chief’s signal, and failed to tack. The ship merely carried on as before, in obedience to previous instructions, and those behind followed meekly in her wake, completely frustrating Sir John’s new intentions.
After so fair a beginning the prospects of victory were dissolving. Continuing southwest, the rearmost British ships of the line opened the expanse of sea behind them to Cordoba’s retreating windward division. Nor were the Spaniards blind to their emerging advantage. Noting also that the last British ship of the line – Collingwood’s Excellent – was lagging, Cordoba saw an opportunity to work around the British rear, or perhaps to slice it between the last two capital ships. If he succeeded he could either rejoin his leeward division or escape to Cadiz with the westerly breeze at his back, leaving Jervis with nothing more than a spirited but indecisive exchange of broadsides to his credit.
Many of Cordoba’s ships were still milling in abject confusion, but some responded to the commander-in-chief’s signals and began to bear up to close with the British rear. With the Spaniards breaking for freedom, the head of the British line trailing astern and the British rear still obligingly creating sea room for their enemies to the north, Sir John’s chances of victory were paling.
But then something unusual happened. Not far from the end of the British line one of the ships began to wear out of formation. Ignoring the admiral’s signals to tack in succession, her bow turned to larboard and came round to face in the opposite direction. Soon the ship was underway again, steering to leeward of the oncoming Diadem and then swinging once more to larboard and cutting through the British line ahead of the trailing Excellent. To the astonishment of many observers the errant warship then struck out boldly for the Spanish fleet.
That ship sailing into history was the seventy-four-gun Captain flying the broad pendant of Commodore Horatio Nelson.
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Nelson had been reading the battle closely, taking the Captain a little to windward of the line of battle to get a better view. Through his telescope he swept left and right. To larboard he saw Moreno mounting his ultimately unsuccessful attack on the British centre from leeward, while to starboard Cordoba was trying to bear up against the rear. It flashed through his mind that the two movements, one on either side of the British line, were related.12
He could see, too, Troubridge’s Culloden and the other ships of the British van striving to reach the rear of the Spanish windward division, a force that greatly outnumbered them, but doubted they would come up in time to frustrate Cordoba’s manoeuvre. Something had to be done. If Cordoba escaped, or even reunited his divisions to leeward, everything Jervis had done would stand for nought.
Nelson knew that the redundant British rear needed to support their van, and that could not be done trailing uselessly southwest to tack in succession. It was necessary to abandon the line and directly engage Cordoba’s division as it struggled to bear up. But breaking the discipline of the line was no light matter. It breached the prevailing fighting instructions, which forbade captains in black and white to quit the line of battle without authorisation. Even more, disobeying the specific orders of a commander-in-chief in the midst of combat flouted the instincts of a service in which discipline was essential to survival. It risked the gravest personal consequences. Failures or disasters were liable to produce scapegoats, and none were more vulnerable than disobedient officers.
It is not surprising that even in the Mediterranean fleet, stuffed with fine captains, few were willing to stick their necks out in the presence of a superior. Close readers of this book will find examples of captains, good captains such as Fremantle and Troubridge, declining to exercise initiative without specific licence. At the battle of Cape St Vincent, even after Nelson’s audacious manoeuvre, not one fellow officer in the British rear followed him – not Thompson, Waldegrave, Towry, Whitshed or Collingwood. Indeed, some fifty minutes after Nelson wore to support the embattled van, Jervis had to fly signal eighty-five to encourage the remainder of his rear.
Supreme self-confidence, a willingness to accept responsibility, opportunism and sheer fighting spirit were hallmarks of Nelson, however. He prided himself on what he called ‘political courage’, and repeatedly acted on it, even in contravention of the orders of superiors. He had disobeyed Hughes in the West Indies, Hotham off the riviera, and even Jervis himself. The previous summer, when Nelson had been blockading Leghorn, Jervis had recalled the Captain to the fleet, ordering the commodore to transfer to a smaller ship so that he could remain on the station. Smelling a battle, Nelson had brought the Captain into the fleet personally, putting himself in the way of an impending battle but overturning his commander-in-chief’s plan to keep him off Leghorn. Later he had also taken Capraia without the specific orders of his superior.
Yet though Nelson’s decision to wear out of line was bold, it has to be seen within the context of his close relationship with Admiral Jervis. When it came to fighting the two men beat to the same heart. Both hungered for victory, and if Nelson acted against the strict letter of Jervis’s orders he most assuredly remained within their spirit. He explained later that the admiral was ‘too much involved in smoke to perceive of facilitating the victory which ensued’. In other words, a commander-in-chief could not be everywhere, and needed like-minded subordinates prepared to exercise initiative in order to achieve the intended result.13
Nelson was probably also conversant, as many historians have not been, with Jervis’s general ideas about fleet tactics. In about 1796 the admiral had issued a set of ‘secret instructions’ relating to battle manoeuvres, illustrated by seven diagrams. The circumstances they considered were not, of course, likely to be precisely replicated in a real battle, but at least they primed the admiral’s captains for the type of manoeuvres he would want to make. For example, they prepared the captains of leading ships to power through an enemy line to cut off its van, and then to tack in succession to envelop the isolated ships. What is more, this plan also involved an independent manoeuvre on the part of the British rear, which, it was suggested, might break the line and wear its ships directly to enter the battle. If Nelson was familiar with these instructions, he would have known that the admiral was by no means insensible of the value of rearmost ships occasionally wearing out of line to support an embattled van.14
Nelson’s manoeuvre was, therefore, indubitably the result of insight, courage and initiative, but it was made by an officer who knew Jervis’s mind, and had a pretty good idea of what the admiral would have been doing with a fuller knowledge of the battle. It was the perfect union of commander and subordinate: the first inspiring and informing, and the second understanding, interpreting and acting to complete what had been begun.
And so a little before one o’clock on 14 February 1797 Commodore Nelson told Miller to wear out of the line of battle and switch to the larboard tack. Passing to leeward of the Diadem they crossed the bows of Collingwood’s Excellent and made straight for the Spanish fleet. Disregarding the danger of enemy broadsides Nelson struck the rear of their fleet at an oblique angle. Although his targets were among the rearmost of Cordoba’s ships, they were also the furthest to leeward, and would have been destined to lead their admiral’s attempt to double the end of the British line. No less important, Nelson focused his attack upon the command centre of the Spanish fleet. Crossing the hawses of some of the Spaniards he pitted his seventy-four against the enemy flagship itself, the massive Santissima Trinidad. 15
Watching in amazement from the Lively frigate at the rear of the British fleet, Colonel Drinkwater thought the duel a ‘preposterous’ mismatch. Nelson’s ‘gigantic’ adversary, her vivid yellow sides streaked in black as if to warn of danger, was one of the large
st ships afloat. She was planked between the quarterdeck and forecastle to give her an additional gun platform, and carried no fewer than one hundred and thirty cannons firing eight-, eighteen-, twenty-four- and thirty-six-pound Spanish shot. Her double-headed shot for tearing down rigging weighed up to fifty English pounds. ‘Such a ship . . . I never saw before,’ gasped Collingwood. Not only that but as Nelson opened a heavy fire on the fearsome four-decker he simultaneously engaged two 112-gun three-deckers (apparently the Salvador del Mundo and the Mexicana) ahead and astern of the flagship, and took occasional fire from two or three other battleships. Captain Miller had drilled the gun crews of the Captain daily, attending many of the exercises himself, and the Santissima Trinidad was poorly designed and her guns ill served, but Nelson was hopelessly under strength. Fortunately, at about the same time that Nelson manoeuvred into position Troubridge reached the tail end of the Spanish fleet with the Culloden, and piled into the fight astern of the Captain. 16
Their attack ‘staggered’ Cordoba and forced his ships to haul their wind to larboard, abandoning their plan to envelop the British rear. According to Miller ‘the whole van of the Spanish fleet’ was deflected by the Captain and Culloden. ‘We turned them . . . like two dogs turning a flock of sheep,’ he said. Others agreed. ‘The highest honours are due to you, my dear friend, and Culloden,’ Collingwood wrote to Nelson. ‘You formed the plan of attack. We were only accessories to the Dons’ ruin, for had they got on the other tack they would have been sooner joined, and the business less complete.’ In time even Culloden’s sterling contribution was forgotten. Had Nelson not joined the assault, remembered a midshipman of the Britannia, ‘we should probably not have taken a single ship’.17
Soon the other leading ships were also reopening fire, the Blenheim, Prince George and Orion, though with diminishing available sea room. Action was occasionally interrupted as one ship or another backed topsails to hold back or filled its sails to move forward again. Nelson battered the hull and rigging of the Spanish flagship, reducing its fire, but his own sails and ropes were being cut to pieces. At about two o’clock, after some forty minutes of carnage, Troubridge nobly interposed his ship between the Captain and the Spanish vessels to give the battered seventy-four a temporary respite. For ten minutes Nelson’s guns fell silent, while his men furiously spliced and repaired damaged rigging, hauled more shot to the guns and carried broken bodies below. Then the Captain’s mizzen topsail filled, she resumed the lead from behind the Culloden and reopened her murderous fire. The efficiency of the British guns was telling cruelly, torturing the big Spaniards with shot after shot into the vitals, but physical exhaustion and the sheer durability of the opponents were draining. By two-thirty the sails and rigging of the Captain and Culloden were wasted and their decks littered with wreckage from aloft. Troubridge hailed Captain Frederick of the Blenheim, inviting him forward while Culloden completed essential repairs. Eagerly the Blenheim slipped inside both the leading ships, briefly shielding them from shot as she took the advanced position.18
But the Spaniards were suffering much more grievously. The Santissima Trinidad struggled ahead, slugging it out with the Blenheim, but the crippled Salvador del Mundo and San Ysidro both dropped astern, where fresh British warships fell upon them like a pod of hungry grampuses. Nelson’s battered Captain found herself engaging ‘different’ foes, the eighty-gun San Nicolas, and another of the large three-deckers, the San Josef of 112 guns, bearing the flag of a rear admiral, Francisco Winthuysen.19
The Captain was more heavily armed than historians have realised. In addition to her nine-, eighteen- and thirty-two-pounders she now carried one or two sixty-eight-pound carronades, but both of her new opponents were markedly superior in the weight of metal fired. The smaller of the two, the San Nicolas, mounted eighty guns, and apart from eighteen-pounders pitted a battery of Spanish thirty-sixes against Nelson’s smaller thirty-twos. Despite her disadvantages, though, the Captain’s gunnery skills more than compensated. Young Oliver Davis told his parents that the Spaniards would ‘certainly’ have sunk the British ship ‘if they [had] activated their guns as they might, but the rogues did not know how’. Nelson pummelled the hulls of both adversaries, bringing yards crashing down on the San Nicolas and shooting away part of the San Josef ’s main topmast and mizzen. The three-decker had already taken a drubbing from the Blenheim, and was also receiving fire from the Prince George, which had run up astern of the Captain. Almost blanketed in smoke she fell to windward, behind the San Nicolas. 20
At three or after help came from Collingwood’s seventy-four-gun Excellent. Signalled into the melee by the commander-in-chief, she passed between the Salvador del Mundo and the San Ysidro at the rear of the Spanish fleet, mutilating them with brutal broadsides. Both ships, being hammered by more than one opponent, struck their colours, but Collingwood moved on towards Nelson’s duel with the San Nicolas and San Josef. He was probably responding to Jervis’s signal number sixty-six, which urged ships forward, but Nelson took it to be an independent act of brotherhood. Instead of taking possession of the prizes, Nelson wrote, Collingwood ‘most gallantly pushed up to save his old friend and messmate, who was to appearance in a critical state’.21
The Excellent’s sails, masts and rigging were already scarred by enemy fire, but her intervention was dramatic. Hauling up his mainsail astern of the Captain, Collingwood ran to windward between Nelson’s ship and the San Nicolas. As he did so, a ruthless rippling broadside from his larboard guns smashed through the Spanish ship at point-blank range. ‘You could not put a bodkin between us,’ said Collingwood, and some of the shot, he thought, exited the San Nicolas on the other side and ploughed into the adjacent San Josef. For a moment the San Nicolas was silenced by that vicious ship-smashing broadside, while her men desperately slaved to clear wreckage, but after the Excellent pressed forward towards the Santissima Trinidad, she bravely began to fire again. As the Captain luffed across her stern to renew the fight and the Prince George worked around towards her bows, the cornered and battered two-decker pluckily fought on.22
But Nelson’s ship was now little more than a wreck. For more than two hours she had been embroiled in an unequal broadside-for-broadside struggle, engaging five or more of the enemy ships at point-blank range, every one of them more powerfully armed than she was. She had suffered more damage than any other ship in the British fleet, and lay almost incapable of manoeuvre. Her mainmast had three shot holes to what Nelson insisted was its ‘heart’, her fore topmast had gone over the side, and her jib blown away. Every yard was damaged and every larboard shroud gone, along with all but one of the braces. The stays, rigging and sails were ripped to pieces, and the wheel that controlled the rudder shot away. Several guns were disabled by ‘numberless hits’, while the rest were low on powder, shot and grape. Nelson’s resourceful gunners were having to use nine-pounder shot to make up deficiencies in the larger calibres, and firing seven at a discharge.23
Men were also dropping, twenty-five alone on Nelson’s blood-spattered quarterdeck. As Nelson and Miller controlled the battle amid shot, grape, bullets and flying debris one man after another was scythed down around them. Major William Morris of the marines was cut down, and one of Miller’s young aides. A shot flashed so close to Miller himself that the wind bruised his thigh, while a splinter from a block hit the side of Nelson’s abdomen with such force that it bowled him off his feet. Miller, who had come to believe his commodore ‘a most noble fellow’, caught him before he fell, ‘shockingly alarmed at the idea of losing him’, but Nelson soon regained his equanimity. He carried on blithely though the wound would worry him for the rest of his life.24
Nevertheless, the attrition could not continue. Horribly mauled the San Nicolas may have been, but she could still bite, and was firing on both the Captain and the Prince George. In appalling fire over a mere twenty yards she killed or wounded fifteen to seventeen men on Nelson’s ship in a few minutes. On the shambles of his quarterdeck, the commodore realised that
the Captain was almost spent. She might slink to leeward, out of the battle, but manoeuvring against the wind to fight was entirely another matter. But there was one more alternative.
Nelson ordered Miller to run the wrecked seventy-four upon the San Nicolas and called for boarders.
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The San Nicolas could hardly avoid the collision. In recoiling from the Excellent’s thunder strokes she had fouled the three-decked San Josef on her windward side and was still boxed in. Miller threw the Captain’s helm hard over, and the ship lurched towards the imprisoned Spaniard, crunching her bow against the enemy starboard quarter. The British bowsprit pushed over the poop deck of the San Nicolas and locked her spritsail yard into the Spanish mizzen shrouds. That bowsprit would become a bridge to the enemy’s upper decks.
Nelson’s boarders were scurrying up from below and massing at the front of the ship. Rugged tars bristling with sharp boarding pikes, cutlasses, pistols and tomahawks, and grim-faced, redcoated soldiers of the 11th and 69th regiments serving as marines, their muskets primed and bayonets fixed. They were embarking upon a desperate venture. The Royal Navy’s advantages in gunnery and seamanship would be of no further use to them once they stormed the enemy ship. This matter would be settled by hot blood and cold steel.
The numbers may have been about equal. Both sides had already suffered heavy casualties. The San Nicolas was the larger ship, with a complement well in excess of six hundred, many of them soldiers, but many of her men were down. The Captain, on the other hand, was carrying a number of supernumeraries in addition to her ship’s company and marines, and many of them were Maltese and ex-Austrian soldiers. Two days before the battle Miller had mustered some six hundred and forty serviceable men.25