Trafalgar


In his introduction to a new eyewitness history to the Battle of Trafalgar, published to mark the battle’s 200th anniversary, Tom Pocock looks at the life and legend of Horatio Nelson

At the time, Lord Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar was seen, first and foremost, as the final defeat of Napoleon’s hopes of invading the British Isles. Napoleon himself had been directly involved in such plans since 1798 – before his expedition to Egypt – and by 1805 had assembled hundreds of landing-craft along the coast of northern France and the Low Countries. When the battle was fought, it was known that the Grande Armée had struck camp along the Channel coast and was marching east. However this was not the end of the threat. The emperor urgently needed to crush his Austrian and Russian enemies before their armies could combine, and he did so that year at Ulm and Austerlitz. But he had not abandoned his plan to invade Britain: ‘I shall stop the Russians and Austrians from uniting. I shall beat them before they can meet. Then, the Continent pacified, I shall come back to the camp on the ocean and start work all over again.’ He would soon have built more than enough battleships to replace those he had lost at Trafalgar. But he knew that for all his brilliant success on land and for all his public bluster, he could never again face the British at sea.

With the command of the sea – the narrow seas around Europe and the broad oceans beyond – that Nelson won in October 1805, he gave his country complete freedom
for its global trade, a freedom now denied to the French Empire and which was not to be challenged until the rise of an aggressive Germany and the First World War. Only the British could now expect to trade unopposed with the West and East Indies, the Americas, India and the Far East. Understanding this, Napoleon was impelled to expand the land frontiers of his empire. This led to British fears that he might seek to dominate, and even annex, the vast, ramshackle Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, which he could reach overland. It was also a factor in his decision to invade Russia. That was to be his undoing, as it was for Hitler more than a century later.

Seen from the twenty-first century, naval warfare in the time of sail requires a major effort of the imagination. Accustomed to weapons of mass destruction, satellite surveillance and communication, and nuclear-powered submarines, we find it difficult to envisage those fleets of wooden battleships driven by great spreads of canvas and dependent upon the vagaries of the wind. Nelson’s flagship, the Victory, preserved in dock at Portsmouth, can only hint at the spectacle once presented by a fleet at sea. The sailing warship, powered by wind and human muscle, was the ultimate development of technology before the coming of steam and iron. A first-rate ship of the line, a battleship, mounting a hundred two- to three-ton guns, would be built of some three thousand tons of timber and propelled by nearly ten tons of sails covering more than two acres, controlled by a thousand wooden pulley blocks in the rigging. Each ship was manned by more than eight hundred men, and would embark provisions to maintain them at sea for four months.

Before Trafalgar, the fleet that Nelson had led across the Atlantic and back in pursuit of the French was at sea for two years. Seamen were rarely allowed ashore for fear that they might desert. They became, in effect, creatures of the sea, strong as leopards and agile as monkeys from their constant duties high on the masts, yards and rigging, making, or taking in, sail. Many were volunteers, who joined to escape privation ashore or in the hope of prize-money; others were simply rounded up by press-gangs at British seaports in a crude form of conscription; some had even been released from prison to serve at sea.

To train and discipline such men to work their ships and fight the enemy was the task of the officers, who led regulated careers, wore standard uniforms and hoped to make a fortune from the prize-money that was earned by captures at sea. By the time of Trafalgar, this was a popular career for the younger sons of the aristocracy, the middle
classes, and those who had risen by merit from the lower deck.

Most of the captains of Nelson’s ships at Trafalgar had been at sea since the age of twelve or thirteen. Their education had mainly been in seamanship, navigation and
gunnery but they sometimes had, like their contemporaries ashore, a smattering of the Classics and were taught to write in copperplate style so that their logs would be
legible. They were physically tough, most of them unsophisticated men inspired by a simple patriotism; and they were unashamedly emotional. It has been said that never
before 1805 had the Royal Navy been at so high a pitch of skill, health and morale.

Nelson himself possessed the qualities he tried to inspire. The son of a gentle, well-educated, middle-class clergyman in rural Norfolk and of a forthright mother related to the landowning aristocracy, he had gone to sea at twelve in 1771. As a young captain, he had made his name on an expedition against the Spanish in Nicaragua and in the Caribbean. Returning home, he had then been unemployed on half pay in the village of his birth, Burnham Thorpe, where he lived with the wife he had married in the West Indies, Fanny Nisbet. There he read not only the newspapers in the hope of reports that war might again be imminent – with the prospect of a naval mobilisation that might give him employment – but also books of seafaring and travel, as well as the plays of Shakespeare, which would inspire some of his most memorable sayings.

Recalled to duty for the war against Revolutionary France at the beginning of 1793, Nelson quickly made up for his wasted years, distinguishing himself in action afloat
and ashore in the Mediterranean. When the British were driven from that sea in 1797, he achieved his first fame at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in the Atlantic: without orders, he steered his ship into the heart of the enemy fleet and captured two enemy ships. Promoted rear-admiral, he survived the defeat that followed his victory, when his attack on Tenerife failed miserably and he lost his right arm in storming ashore. But he had been seen to lead from the front, taking personal risks which were usually regarded as unnecessary for an officer of his rank.

So, to his surprise and delight, it was the one-armed Nelson who, in 1798, was chosen to lead the British back into the Mediterranean. It was he who searched for the French fleet when General Bonaparte (as he still was) disappeared from Toulon that summer with a huge convoy of troopships and nobody knew where he had gone. He found them off the coast of Egypt and, although the French army had already been landed, he destroyed the escorting fleet in Aboukir Bay on 1 August. French plans to occupy and colonise Egypt, and eventually march on India, had been thwarted.

Now followed the most controversial period of Nelson’s life. In Naples to refit his flagship, the Vanguard, and to recover from a wound, he fell in love with Emma Hamilton, wife of the British minister to the kingdom of the Two Sicilies (southern Italy and Sicily), Sir William Hamilton. The scandal tarnished Nelson’s reputation, as did his disregarding of orders he considered unwise and his part in the ruthless suppression of the republican rising in Naples.

Nelson returned to England in November 1800. Following the Hamilton affair, and his final break with his wife, he was ostracised at court and by polite society. However,
as his legend spread, he came to be loved by the mass of the population as much as by the men he commanded. This was not only because he was seen to share their hardships and dangers, and had shown extraordinary courage in action, but because he appeared as vulnerable to temptation as the next man.

Nelson was socially insecure but he was also ambitious. His success rested not only upon his brilliance as a tactician at sea but on his skill as a communicator and administrator. He was able to make fast friends of his captains, even after only one or two meetings. Often those who had never met him regarded him as a friend; only five of his twenty-seven captains at Trafalgar had served with him before but they all dined with him in his flagship before the battle and thereafter saw their relationship with him as having been close. One of these, Edward Codrington, said that, above all, they all wanted to please Nelson; twenty-six of these captains repainted their ships’ hulls before the battle in Nelson’s favourite colours – yellow and black bands – so that when the gun-ports were open the ‘Nelson’s chequer’ effect was produced.

When, just before the battle, Nelson made his famous signal, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ the remarkable thing was not so much the message itself but that, by using the new signal code invented by Commodore Sir Home Popham, he seemed to have spoken personally to the whole fleet. Signals had previously been used to order practical manoeuvres, give warnings and orders to open or cease fire; this was the first time they had been used to speak person to person.

As a naval administrator Nelson paid more attention than other admirals to the welfare of his men, including the supply of fresh food, notably fruit and vegetables to guard them against scurvy and other illnesses prevalent at sea. It was obviously impossible for an admiral to monitor the personal problems of the thousands of men in his ships, but by the example of his concern for welfare in the Victory and amongst the captains he knew, he hoped to spread such attitudes to his officers. Stories of Nelson’s humanity were well known by the ratings. While he would stand on the quarterdeck throughout an action, he expected that, before his ship opened fire, his men would lie down between their guns to minimise casualties.

Nelson’s fame and popularity were undimmed by what was seen as an unnecessary victory over the Danes at Copenhagen in 1801 and a clear defeat of Boulogne in the
same year. When the Peace of Amiens collapsed and war was renewed in May 1803, the government unhesitatingly chose Nelson as the new commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean. He had set new standards for the Royal Navy in leadership and in fighting: from now on the enemy had not only to be defeated but annihilated.

The importance of the Mediterranean, for both sides, was that the main French naval base was at Toulon, which, with Brest, would be the principal springboard for any future offensive by sea, whether to the Middle East, the West Indies or the British Isles. It was the threat of invasion that concentrated British minds most. British strategy aimed to prevent the combining of the French fleets into a force which could cover a cross-Channel invasion.

The enemy fleets had to be blockaded in their ports – Brest, Rochefort and Toulon and, once Spain had entered the war in December 1804, Spanish ports as well. But this
was not the final answer. There was always the chance that they could escape: an offshore gale that would carry them out of port would also drive the blockaders off-station, so opening a passage to the seas. If the enemy were intercepted at sea, success would depend upon two factors. First, the use of tactics to outwit the enemy so as to reduce and eliminate any advantage in numbers he might have, perhaps by overwhelming one part of his fleet before the remainder could come to his aid. Second, by making the fullest use of the superior skills of British sailors in working and fighting their ships, acquired from long experience at sea.

Fundamentally, there was little to choose between the ships of the opposing fleets; indeed, those built by France and its ally Spain were sometimes superior to the weatherworn ships of the British. There was no lack of courage among French and Spanish crews, as was to be demonstrated at Trafalgar. Experience was what counted. To the British, accustomed to long months at sea, the handling of sails and the fighting of guns in a pitching and rolling ship had become routine. This was not so for the French and Spanish, cooped up in port for so long. Moreover, the British were led by officers bred to the life and glorying in a tradition of success. The French officer corps had been broken up by the Revolution and had yet to recover.

At the beginning of 1805, the French had fifty-six ships of the line ready for sea and were building another fifteen, against eighty-three British ships with another twenty to thirty in reserve or refitting. But when the Spanish fleet was added to the French the combined fleets comprised more than one hundred battleships. So the opposing fleets could expect to meet on broadly equal terms. And that is what happened in October 1805.

Reports of Trafalgar reached Paris about ten days after the battle and were forwarded to Napoleon in central Europe. It is tempting to imagine that they might have arrived
even sooner because of a grim event in Paris. Exactly one week after the battle, a British naval officer, Captain John Wright, who had been an intelligence agent operating
with the French royalists inside France, was murdered in the Temple prison. Could this have been revenge for Trafalgar? Was it possible for the news to have reached
Paris from Cadiz in a week? Probably this will never be known.

The news reached Napoleon in Moravia while he was on the march towards Austerlitz. When the despatch was handed to him at dinner, he was said to have shown no
emotion and remarked that it would not change his ‘plans for cruising’. Either he did not comprehend the consequences, or was in denial of them. But he did impose a tight censorship of the press until one newspaper, the Journal du Commerce, printed a report of ‘a most bloody action’ off Cadiz in which ‘both fleets fought with the greatest determination’ and which had been followed by a violent storm that ‘dispersed the ships’. Spanish newspapers were under no such inhibition, presenting the catastrophe as an honourable, indeed glorious, defeat. The truth was kept from the French people until after the announcement of Napoleon’s great victory at Austerlitz on 2 December.

In May 1806, when the emperor had returned to Paris, he received the two French captains who had most distinguished themselves at Trafalgar – Lucas of the Redoutable and Infernet of the Intrépide – and decorated them with the Légion d’honneur. That, however, was the only glory he could snatch from the disaster. In the English-speaking world, the memory of Nelson, his achievement and his death at the hour of victory was kept alive by what amounted to a commemorative industry. It began with paintings and prints, continued with monuments and memorials, plaster busts and Staffordshire pottery figures. There was an outpouring of verse, songs and theatrical tableaux and, eventually, plays and films. Towns, rivers and mountains around the world were named after Nelson. His achievements were spelled out in hundreds of books, beginning with the commissioning in 1806 of a major biography by the Reverend James Stanier Clarke and John McArthur – who knew many of Nelson’s friends through their writing for the Naval Chronicle – and reaching a zenith in the bicentennial year 2005. Not only do the wardrooms of the Royal Navy continue to hold Trafalgar Night dinners and toast ‘The Immortal Memory of Lord Nelson’, but there are also innumerable groups, formal and informal, and two societies devoted to the commemoration and study of Nelson.

The decisive outcome at Trafalgar has inevitably been a subject for revisionist historians. It has even been said that Trafalgar was of little real importance because the result of any such encounter was a foregone conclusion. This might not have been entirely so in other circumstances: had Nelson himself been absent, or had his former rival been present, the able French admiral Louis-René Latouche-Tréville, who had defeated him off Boulogne and commanded what was to be the opposing fleet until his sudden death in 1804. The importance of the battle is that it was fought and won.

A more absurd canard, often repeated, is that Nelson was seeking his own death in battle that day because he foresaw the breakdown of his relationship with Emma Hamilton and the probability of his own blindness, for the sight of his undamaged eye – his right eye had been almost blinded in 1794 during the campaign in Corsica – was deteriorating. This notion is refuted by the amount of written evidence to the contrary. Nelson was still in love with Emma, adored their child, Horatia, and longed to see them both again. He had certainly felt premonitions of death in battle, or from disease, for he was a lifelong hypochondriac and pessimist. Thoughts of suicide, however, would never have entered his head.

The most significant results of the victory were long-term. Nelson himself gave the British a hero, a figurehead, such as they had lacked, to counter the baleful appeal of
Napoleon himself. His extraordinary life ended not only in high style but in what has been described as ‘the poetry of Trafalgar’. His serenity during the last days of his life
and the sublime words of his prayer before battle seemed to assume almost religious undertones: the saviour sacrificing himself for his people. Indeed, Lord Byron described
Nelson as ‘Britannia’s god of war’, and his image, as no other, has remained at the heart of the British ethos. The victory itself, the culmination of what had become accustomed success at sea, if not on land, gave the British, now secure on their island, an unshakeable self-confidence.

Later in the nineteenth century, this sometimes led to over-confidence and the Royal Navy, upon which all depended, became inclined to rest on its laurels. The two great challenges by Germany in the twentieth century brought Britain close to defeat, but it could be argued that this self-confidence, although often unjustified, was the most significant single factor in carrying the nation through to eventual victory. After Trafalgar, every British admiral would be judged by what were seen to be the standards
of Nelson.

Trafalgar itself continues to be subjected to as close scrutiny as the character and actions of Nelson himself. The tactics he employed in his final battle have been analysed by a wide range of investigators, ranging from the report in 1913 of The Committee Appointed by the Admiralty to Examine and Consider the Evidence Relating to the Tactics Employed by Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, Presented to Parliament by Command of His Majesty to the thesis Admiral Nelson’s Tactics at the Battle of Trafalgar, written for the University of Edinburgh in 2004 by a German academic Dr Marianne Czisnik, which pays particular attention to Nelson’s feint attack on the enemy van. The battle has been the subject of lectures, debates and seminars in the bicentennial year as well as television and radio programmes for mass audiences.

Perhaps 2005 is an appropriate time to look back at this pivotal event. With Britain now a racially and religiously mixed nation and on the brink of drawing even closer to integration with its old enemies on the Continent in some form of United Europe, the event of October 1805 can be seen with more detachment; with admiration for past skill
and courage, with nostalgia for perceived lost glories, or simply with wonder. Certainly it cannot be ignored, or forgotten.

Author of eight books on Nelson, Tom Pocock is author of The Terror Before Trafalgar: Nelson, Napoleon and the Secret War (2003), Horatio Nelson (1994) and Nelson’s Women (2002). He has also written biographies of Captain Marryat, Rider Haggard and Alan Moorehead. He lives in London.

Links

Trafalgar
The Pursuit of Victory