Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero. Adam Nicolson
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the hard place, as Clausewitz would call it, the defending force would then be able at least to equalise the numbers of ships engaged. This never happened. Early in the morning, as the fleet reversed direction and turned northwards, Gravina’s squadron had become mixed in with the rear of the Combined Fleet. Their identity as a separate squadron was muddled away and Gravina’s ships would enter the battle, one by one, as they came up to the series of mêlées which developed in the centre of the fleet.
At the very beginning, Villeneuve lost his ability to reshape the battle. His fleet waited in a state of victimhood. By about ten o’clock, they ended up in a shallow crescent, about eight miles long, partly bunched together, partly overlapping, and with vulnerable gaps opening in places through which an enemy could drive. Every eyeglass on every British ship watched those gaps. That was where battle would be joined.
1 Put out
2 eyes
October 21st 18058.30 am to 9.30 am
Distance between fleets: 6.5 miles-5.9 miles
Victory’s heading and speed: 034°-067° at 2.5 knots
Order is Heav’n’s first Law
ALEXANDER POPE, Essay on Man, 1734
As the British ships made their slow progress to the eastward, the crews were struck by the beauty of the spectacle they were creating. In the log of the Mars, Thomas Cook, her master, described what the men were about this morning: ‘making Ship perfectly clear for Action’. The clarity before battle was a form of perfection. It was the beauty of order and arrangement, each part of each ship designed for its task, each related to and dependent on all others, a network of interaction. Forget for a minute that these are killing machines. Years later, Midshipman Hercules Robinson of the Euryalus reminisced:
There is now before me the beautiful misty sun-shiny morning of the 21st October. The delight of us all at the idea of a wearisome blockade, about to terminate with a fair stand-up fight, of which we knew the result. The noble fleet, with royals and studding sails on both sides, bands playing, officers in full dress, and the ships covered with ensigns, hanging in various places where they could never be struck.
According to John Brown, a seaman on Victory, ‘the French and Spanish Fleets was like a great wood on our lee bow which cheered the hearts of every British tar in the Victory like lions anxious to be at it.’ Nelson, again and again, commented to the frigate captains he had summoned on board Victory how much the enemy were standing up for a fight, not running and scattering to all corners. The scene looked as these moments were intended to look: a clash of organisations in which men, ships, fleets, naval systems and countries were to be put to the test.
The Euryalus had been in close to the mouth of Cadiz harbour on the preceding days, looking for the slightest sign of enemy preparation. Midshipman Robinson remembered how
The morning of the 19th of October saw us so close to Cadiz as to see the ripple of the beach and catch the morning fragrance which came out of the land, and then as the sun rose over the Trocadero with what joy we saw the fleet inside let fall and hoist their topsails and one after another slowly emerge from the harbour mouth.
His captain, Henry Blackwood, had written on the 20th to his wife in England:
What do you think, my own dearest love? At this moment the Enemy are coming out, and as if determined to have a fair fight. You see also, my Harriet, I have time to write to you, and to assure you that to the last moment of my breath I shall be as much attached to you as man can be, which I am sure you will credit. It is very odd how I have been dreaming all night of my carrying home dispatches. God send so much good luck! The day is fine; the sight of course, beautiful.…God bless you. No more at present.
Captain Edward Codrington on the Orion wrote smilingly to his wife:
We have now a nice air, which fills our flying kites and drives us along at four knots an hour…How would your heart beat for me, dearest Jane, did you but know that we are under every stitch of sail we can set, steering for the enemy.
Codrington missed Jane with a passion, writing to her that he was ‘full of hope that Lord Nelson’s declaration would be verified; viz. that we should have a good battle and go home to eat our Christmas dinner.’ On the Belleisle, Lieutenant Paul Nicolas described how
I was awakened by the cheers of the crew and by their rushing up the hatchways to get a glimpse of the hostile fleet. The delight manifested exceeded anything I ever witnessed, surpassing even those gratulations when our native cliffs are descried after a long period of distant service.
They were seeing battle as home, as the moment of perfection, with the sweet-smelling scents of Iberia wafting across the stretch of sea at which they had arrived, and the Atlantic breakers beyond it creaming on to the sand.
Over this very stretch of sea, 18 months before, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had sailed to Malta in convoy, shepherded by Captain Henry Bayntun in HMS Leviathan. For the poet it was a passage of troubled but at times ecstatic happiness, running from opium and hopelessness in England to the warmth of the Mediterranean. His journal of the voyage speaks, in a way no naval officer could, of the beauties which were so clearly felt on the morning of Trafalgar. ‘Oh with what envy I have gazed at our commodore,’ Coleridge wrote, half in love with ships,
the Leviathan of 74 guns, the majestic and beautiful creation, sailing right before us, upright, motionless, as a church with its steeple—as though moved by its will, as though its speed were spiritual.
This morning, Tuesday April 10th, 1804, a fine sharp morning—the Sea rolls rough & high / but the Ships are before us & behind us. I count 35, & the lonely Gulls fish in among the Ships / & what a beautiful object even a single wave is!
Delightful weather, motion, relation of the convoy to each other, all exquisite/—and I particularly watched the beautiful Surface of the Sea in this gentle Breeze!—every form so transitory, so for the instant, & and yet for that instant so substantial in all its sharp lines, steep surfaces, & hair-deep indentures, just as if it were cut glass, glass cut into ten thousand varieties / & then the network of the wavelets, & the rude circle hole network of the Foam /
And on the gliding Vessel Heaven & Ocean smil’d!
That is a line from one of Wordsworth’s poems in Lyrical Ballads, in which the female vagrant who speaks is in a wretched condition herself but can nevertheless grasp the beauty in the gliding Vessel before her. That is Coleridge’s predicament too, broken himself, but in love with the orderliness of the Leviathan’s convoy around him.
On the morning of the 21 October 1805, with the huge bluff ships surging beneath them and the sails slatting in the swells, there was little to do but contemplate the excellence of their own fleet and the prospect of violence to come. In the steady breeze and on the constant course, there was little need to adjust the trim of the sails. The only movement was at the wheel, where the helmsman steered to port as the swell lifted beneath him, to starboard as it dropped the bow in the trough that followed. Men had breakfast. Captains showed their lieutenants Nelson’s memorandum, in case they were ‘bowled out’ in the action and the lieutenants needed to take command. On the poops, their bands played ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Britons strike home’ and ‘Hearts of Oak’, first written after the triumphant victories of 1759, the Annus Mirabilis of the Seven Years War:
Come, cheer up my lads,
It’s to glory we steer,
To add something more
To this wonderful year.
To honour we call