Trafalgar

by Nicholas Best

  I was under the break of the poop, aiding in running out a carronade. A cry of ‘Stand clear, there! Here it comes!’ made me look up, and at that instant the mainmast fell over the bulwarks just above me. This ponderous mass made the ship’s whole frame shake; had it taken a central direction it would have gone through the poop, and added many to our list of sufferers.

  Without masts, the Belleisle was helpless, but certainly not beaten. Her guns continued to fire whenever they could. Captain William Hargood had been bruised from neck to hip by a splinter, which had thrown him into the splinter netting. He untangled himself, cursing horribly, and emerged yelping with rage. ‘Let ’em come on!’ he bellowed. ‘I’m damned if I’ll strike. No, never – to nobody whatever!’ The story passed rapidly around the ship, to everyone’s amusement.

  The wind had dropped just as the Belleisle and Mars reached the enemy, making it difficult for the rest of Collingwood’s column to get into the action. The Belleisle’s crew had been fighting alone for more than two hours when an unidentified two-decker appeared through the smoke, steering straight towards them. They watched with increasing apprehension until a slight change in the two-decker’s course revealed a White Ensign at the stern. The newcomer was the Swiftsure. The two crews cheered each other as she swept past. The Polyphemus was coming up as well, and the Defiance. They tore into the enemy and relieved the pressure on the Belleisle.

  Not far away, the Mars had also been taking a beating. Originally ordered by Nelson to lead Collingwood’s column into action, the Mars was slow in the water and had suffered the indignity of being overtaken by both the Royal Sovereign and the Belleisle as they headed for the enemy. She was commanded by George Duff, a gentlemanly Scot much admired by his crew. His twelve-year-old son Norwich was with him, serving as a midshipman. ‘Norwich is quite well and happy,’ Duff had written to his wife as they turned towards the enemy. ‘I have, however, ordered him off the quarterdeck.’ Duff knew he would have been answerable to his wife if he hadn’t sent their son below as the shooting started.

  In the event, it was Duff who was killed, rather than his son. The Mars had come under fire from the San Juan Nepomuceno, Pluton, Monarca, Algesiras and Fougueux. A cannon ball hit him in the chest and ripped off his head, killing two other people as well. The rest of the crew promptly ‘held his body up and gave three cheers to show they were not discouraged by it, and then returned to their guns’, leaving the body sprawled in the gangway.

  Aboard the Royal Sovereign, the arrival of other British ships had been a relief to Collingwood as the battle raged. Three enemy ships had immediately sheered off, leaving him free to concentrate on the Santa Ana, the flagship of Vice-Admiral Ignatio de Alava. It was a spectacular feat to sail straight for the enemy line and take on their flagship single-handed, surrounded by nothing but hostile ships. Collingwood had been surprised when the Santa Ana failed to surrender after his first furious broadside. The Spanish had put up a noble resistance, trading shot for shot with the Royal Sovereign until both ships were little more than splintered wrecks, their sides streaked with blood from the drain holes on deck. But it couldn’t go on for ever. At length, Vice-Admiral Alava was wounded and Spanish resistance crumbled. The Santa Ana’s colours eventually came down and she surrendered at last to the Royal Sovereign.

  By then, though, Collingwood was barely in a position to receive the surrender. His mizenmast had just fallen and the other two were about to follow. If that wasn’t enough, a boat had just come alongside from the Victory. Lieutenant Alexander Hills had brought a message from Captain Hardy. Lord Nelson had been wounded, Collingwood’s dear friend of thirty years’ standing.

  Collingwood asked Hills if the wound was dangerous. ‘He hesitated; then said he hoped it was not; but I saw the fate of my friend in his eye; for his look told what his tongue could not utter.’

  There was no time to mourn. The Royal Sovereign’s mainmast came crashing down, joining the mizenmast over the side. The ship could no longer move without help. Collingwood hastily signalled to the Euryalus to give him a tow. There was still plenty of fighting to be done. The Royal Sovereign’s guns could still be brought to bear, with help from Blackwood’s frigate to steer her round.

  First, though, Collingwood sent Captain Blackwood aboard the Santa Ana to receive the Spanish admiral’s surrender and bring him back to the Royal Sovereign. But Alava was too badly wounded to go anywhere. It was the second-in-command, Captain José Gardoqui, who came instead. He had already been across once, proffering his sword and asking in fractured English the name of the ship he had been fighting. ‘I think she should be called the Royal Devil,’ he is said to have responded when they told him, patting one of the Sovereign’s guns admiringly.

  While the Euryalus took the Royal Sovereign in tow, the other ships in Collingwood’s column were fighting individual duels of their own – ‘every man to take his bird’, as an officer on the Tonnant put it. They all fought their own actions in the smoke, with little idea of what was happening anywhere else in the fleet.

  The Tonnant had originally been a French ship, captured at the Nile and recommissioned into the Royal Navy She was fourth in Collingwood’s line, behind the Belleisle and Mars. Like them, she came under fire as she approached the enemy and took multiple casualties, including a couple of musicians in the band. Frederick Hoffman was the third lieutenant on board:

  A French ship of eighty guns, with an Admiral’s flag, came up and poured a raking broadside into our stern, which killed or wounded forty petty officers and men, nearly cut the rudder in two, and shattered the whole of the stern, with the quarter galleries. She then, in the most gallant manner, locked her bowsprit in our starboard main shrouds and attempted to board us with the greater part of her officers and ship’s company. She had riflemen in her tops who did great execution. Our poop was soon cleared, and our gallant Captain shot through the left thigh, and obliged to be carried below.

  The French ship was the Algesiras, under Rear-Admiral Magon. Locked at an angle into the Tonnant’s main shrouds, she was unable to bring her main guns to bear on the British. But the Tonnant could bring almost all her quarterdeck guns and carronades to bear on the Algesiras, and lost no time doing so. It wasn’t long before the Algesiras’s rigging had been shot to pieces. In desperation, Magon decided to try and board the Tonnant to put a stop to the destruction.

  Before the battle he had promised a gilded shoulder belt to the first member of his crew to board an English ship. ‘The first man to board that ship with me shall have the cross!’ he reminded them now. Magon led the charge himself, intending to use the bowsprit as a bridge to the British ship. But a musket ball shot away his hat and wig before he had got more than a few yards. Another hit him in the arm and a third in the shoulder. Bleeding badly, Magon refused to go below and was killed by a cannon ball a little later. The boarding party was taken over by Lieutenant Guillaume Verdreau, but he too was shot down before he could reach the Tonnant. Only one Frenchman managed to reach the British ship. He was promptly spiked in the leg with a half-pike and would have been killed if Lieutenant Hoffman hadn’t intervened and had him sent down to the cockpit to join the rest of the wounded.

  The cockpit was a busy place when the Frenchman arrived. A total of sixteen men had an arm or leg amputated during the course of the action. Surgeon Forbes Chevers was operating by the light of dim tallow candles. ‘If you look straight into the wound, and see all that I do, I shall see perfectly,’ he told the men holding the lights for him. As soon as Chevers had finished, the amputees were scooped up by Purser George Booth and a petty officer’s wife, ‘a very powerful and resolute woman’, much larger than Booth. Between them, they ‘carried the sailors who had been operated upon to their temporary berths, taking them up in their arms as if they had been children, in a manner which Chevers, himself a tall and very strong young man, always spoke of with expressions of wonder’. For all their care, however, only two of the amputees survived their operations.

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bsp; The fight had continued for half an hour, the two ships locked tightly together, when fire broke out on both of them ‘before the cross-trees’. The British immediately brought up their fire engine and sprayed water over the two vessels. It took a long time to put the flames out, and two men were badly injured in the process. Lieutenant Hoffman watched from the Tonnant’s deck:

  At length we had the satisfaction of seeing her three lower masts go by the board, ripping the partners up in their fall, as they had been shot through the lower-deck, and carrying with them all their sharpshooters to look sharper in the next world, for, as all our boats were shot through, we could not save one of them in this. The crew were then ordered, with the Second Lieutenant, to board her. They cheered, and in a short time carried her. They found the gallant French Admiral Magon killed at the foot of the poop ladder, and the Captain dangerously wounded . . . We had pummelled her so handsomely that fourteen of her lower-deck guns were dismounted and her larboard bow exhibited a mass of splinters.

  The British placed Lieutenant Charles Bennett in command of the captured vessel, with forty-eight men to support him. But that was not the end of the fighting for the Tonnant. She was also engaged with Churruca’s San Juan Nepomuceno. As the French were surrendering, so too were the Spanish, as Lieutenant Benjamin Clement observed:

  I hailed a Spanish officer and asked him if he had struck. When he said ‘Yes’, I came aft and informed the First-Lieutenant. He ordered me to board her. We had no boat but what was shot, but he told me I must try, so I went away in the jolly-boat with two men, but had not got above a quarter of the way when the boat swampt.

  I cannot swim, but the two men who were with me could, one a black man and the other a quarter-master; he was the last man in her, when a shot struck her and knocked her quarter off, and she was turned bottom up. Macnamara, the black man, staid [sic] by me on one side, and Maclay, the quarter-master, on the other . . . I found myself weak and thought I was not long for this world. Macnamara swam to the ship and got a rope and to me again, and made it fast under my arms, when I swung off, and was hauled into the stern port.

  It had been the narrowest of escapes for Clement. He owed his life to Charles Macnamara. For as long as he lived, he never forgot his debt to the black volunteer from Barbados who had saved him from drowning.

  Behind the Tonnant, the Bellerophon was the fifth ship in Collingwood’s column as they approached the enemy line. Known to one and all as the Billy Ruff’n, she was a hard-fighting ship under a tough captain. John Cooke had never served with Nelson before, but it had long been his ambition to fight a battle under the admiral’s command. He was getting his wish at last, standing proudly on the poop as the Bellerophon followed the Tonnant into action.

  They opened their battle earlier than planned, when one of the Bellerophon’s midshipmen tripped over a trigger line and fired a gun by mistake. Several enemy ships responded vigorously, assuming the lone gun to be some kind of signal. Like everyone else, Cooke had intended to hold his fire until reaching the enemy, but changed his mind when the Bellerophon began to suffer casualties. He opened fire in return, partly to give his men something to do to steady their nerves, but mostly to cover his ship in smoke and reduce her visibility as a target.

  They broke the enemy line astern of the Spanish ship Bahama. Commanded by Commodore Galiano, the Bahama was part of Admiral Gravina’s observer squadron, which had now managed to join the action. The Bellerophon was turning to port to lay alongside her when another enemy ship emerged from the smoke ahead. The Bellerophon backed sails immediately, but too late to avoid a collision. The crew barely had time to see the word Aigle on the newcomer’s stern before they had run into her, the Bellerophon’s foreyard locking into the Aigle’s mainyard.

  Two other enemy ships joined the fight as well, relentlessly pouring fire into the Bellerophon from different angles. But the Aigle was her chief opponent. Of the fifty-eight men on the Bellerophon’s quarterdeck, fifty-four were eventually cut down by enemy fire. Their numbers included Captain Cooke, as an eyewitness remembered:

  He had discharged his pistols very frequently at the enemy, who as often attempted to board, and he had killed a French officer on his own quarter-deck. He was in the act of reloading his pistols . . . when he received two musket balls in his breast. He immediately fell, and upon the Quarter-Master’s going up and asking him if he should take him down below, his answer was: ‘No, let me lie quietly one minute. Tell Lieutenant Cumby never to strike!’

  Cooke died seconds later. Edward Overton, the ship’s master, was dying too. Of the three men who had studied Nelson’s plan of attack that morning, only William Cumby was still in one piece. Quickly taking command, he saw that the Bellerophon’s upper deck had been almost completely cleared by musket fire and grenades from the 150 soldiers aboard the Aigle. The French were about to storm the Bellerophon and take the ship. But they had reckoned without Cumby.

  I ordered all the remaining men down from the Poop and calling the boarders had them mustered under the half-deck and held them in readiness to repel any attempt that might be made by the enemy to board us, their position rendering it quite impracticable for us to board them in the face of such a fire of musquetry so advantageously situated. But whatever advantage they had over us on these upper decks was greatly overbalanced by the superiority of our fire on the lower and main decks . . . Whilst thus closely engaged and rubbing sides with L’Aigle she threw many hand grenades on board us, both on our forecastle and gangway and in at the ports. Some of these exploded and dreadfully scorched several of our men. One of them I took up myself from our gangway where the fuse was burning and threw it overboard.

  The Bellerophon’s decks were covered with loose gunpowder that exploded as well, adding to the list of casualties. One man was so badly burned that he ran aft and jumped overboard rather than take himself to the surgeon. The noise was so awful that Signal-Midshipman John Franklin (later Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer) was left slightly deaf for the rest of his life. The Bellerophon and Aigle were so close together that many Frenchmen tried to jump the gap, as Franklin later remembered. ‘In the attempt their hands received some severe blows from whatever the English could lay their hands on. In this way hundreds of Frenchmen fell between the ships and were drowned.’

  The fighting was intense, men seizing each other’s ramrods and jabbing viciously at each other across the divide. Franklin swore he would never forget the face of a French sharpshooter, falling dead from the Aigle’s foretop into the sea. Five other Frenchmen joined him when a British sailor dislodged them from a yardarm. The Bellerophon’s colour was shot away three times, giving the impression that she had surrendered. ‘That’s too bad,’ exclaimed Yeoman of Signals Christopher Beatty. ‘Those fellows will say we’ve struck!’ Fetching another Union Jack from the flag-locker, Beatty shinned up the mizen rigging to the masthead. The French did their best to kill him until they saw what he was up to. Then they held their fire for a few seconds, apparently allowing him to lash the colour to the mast. Beatty was the only man to climb the English rigging unscathed.

  The battle ended in stalemate, neither ship giving way to the other. Both captains were dead, and the Aigle had been badly damaged in the struggle. She managed to pull away from the Bellerophon after a while, breaking free before she was forced to surrender. With two topmasts down and other bits shot away, the Bellerophon was in no state to follow. The Bellerophon’s cockpit was so full of wounded that the captain’s cabin had to be used for the overflow. Men were queuing outside to have their arms amputated. They had fought with spectacular courage, but the cost had been high, when they came to count it. Of the 540 men in the Bellerophon’s crew, almost one in three had been killed or wounded. It was one of the highest casualty ratios in the British fleet.

  While the Bellerophon assessed the damage, the Aigle drifted away, her quarter beaten in. She was raked by the Revenge in passing, then attacked by the Defiance, the sternmost ship in Collingwood’s colu
mn. It was the last thing she needed after her long fight with the Bellerophon.

  The two ships came within pistol range of each other. Already badly mauled, the Aigle was in no state to take on the Defiance. Her fire soon slackened, suggesting she was ready to surrender. The British decided to board her, but had trouble getting alongside without a wind. They couldn’t row across either because the Defiance’s boats had all been shot to pieces.

  Midshipman James Spratt – Jack to his friends – was serving as master’s mate on the Defiance. He was Irish, one of the handsomest men in the navy. With no other way of getting to the Aigle, he decided to swim across. Yelling at his men to follow, he ‘plunged overboard from the starboard gangway with my cutlass between my teeth and my tomahawk under my belt’ and headed for the Aigle.

  No one followed. His men had very sensibly failed to hear him in all the noise. Spratt had no choice but to swim on alone, climbing up the Aigle’s rudder chains and entering the ship through a gun port in the stern. There he made the unwelcome discovery that the French were nowhere near surrender. Undaunted, Spratt fought his way through the ship and emerged on to the Aigle’s poop, where ‘[I] showed myself to our ship’s crew from the enemy’s taffrail and gave them a cheer with my hat on the point of my cutlass.’