Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  What scandalised Spanish opinion more than anything else, though, were the civilian casualties. The wife of a colonel of artillery was wounded in the battle and died of her wounds when a prisoner in England. On the Mercedes were a large number of ‘Spanish gentlemen and 19 ladies,’ as it was reported in the Naval Chronicle, ‘with their families, from Lima, returning to Old Spain, who, with the Spanish Captain, his wife, and seven children, all unfortunately perished in the explosion which took place.’ The presence of these people was known to the British commodore, but he had no hesitation, once the Spaniards had refused his invitation to accompany him to an English port, in making, as he described it in his dispatch, ‘the signal for close battle, which was instantly commenced with all the alacrity and vigour of English sailors.’ Moore was acting entirely in accord with British government policy. As Lord Harrowby, the British Foreign Secretary informed the Madrid Court, ‘it was an act done in express orders from his Majesty, to detain all ships laden with treasure for Spain.’ Spain was paying reluctant subsidies to France and so her bullion was seen by the British as war material. Heartlessness at sea, and never more than when in pursuit of gold, was British policy. Nelson himself was described by the deeply conservative and nationalistic Spanish poet Francisco Sánchez Barbaro as ‘el tirano del mar’ and ‘el héroe más bárbaro y tirano’. In the daily Diario de Madrid, the British in general were seen as ‘los arrogantes usurpadores de la libertad de los mares’. It seems, in retrospect, a perfectly legitimate description.

  The language and perception was shared by the French. ‘The sea must become free like the land,’ the revolutionary zealot André Jeanbon Saint-André had told the French fleet in Brest in January 1794.

  Deploy therefore all the force and power which the People, whom you have the honour to represent, can give to exterminate the most miserable of its enemies, the speculators of London, the oppressors of Bengal, the disturbers of public peace in Europe. Ships, cannon, sailors: such must be your rallying cry.

  Far more than any war of the 18th century, this was a triangular, ideological conflict. A post-revolutionary, authoritarian regime in France, profoundly subversive of all the accepted nostrums of pre-modern European society, was allied in Spain with the most conservative and backward of all the European powers, the trailing partner in the alliance, against a Britain which already embodied a distinctly modern Atlanticist set of values—commercial, libertarian, amoral and aggressive—but which remained, nevertheless, dressed in some very old-fashioned ‘King and Country’, monarchist 18th-century Establishment clothes.

  Spain was the poorest, weakest, most inefficient and most antique of the three. It remained in 1805 a profoundly conservative country. The radical changes that had already occurred further north in Europe scarcely impinged, except in the most superficial of ways, on the style, thinking and government of the country. Spain was without a middle class. Enormous armies of desperately poor landless peasants languished at the bottom of society. A hereditary aristocracy remained, at least in theory, the dominant class, motivated by little except a kind of piety towards the crown, its institutions and the Roman church. The Spanish navy was officered by those aristocrats and manned by those peasants—a plebeian/patrician polarity on which the working of modern, high technology men-of-war, with highly complex systems of both sailing and fighting the vessels, could not easily rely.

  On top of that, the Spanish aristocracy had learned to exist in a kind of dependency culture. Spain itself, scarcely developed from its own medieval poverty, had relied for two and a half centuries on the wealth it had extracted from the New World. Six or eight generations of its leading families had come to understand that no effort was required in order to enjoy the fruits of life. They had become indolent. Work was anathema to them. The hereditary offices which they still held were performed for them by low-grade administrative clerks. Unlike in England, the aristocracy was still difficult to penetrate. Soldiers, bankers and lawyers had yet to enter its ranks. It had become, in a word, effete.

  Spain had lagged behind. Professional people were still miserably paid and of low standing, treated as minor functionaries. The productive cycle which had been developing in Britain for a century or more between higher growth, better standards of living, rising expectations, a hunger for world markets and a burgeoning economy had scarcely begun in Spain. Disease still reigned: although plague had finally disappeared in the 1720s, ‘flu, smallpox, typhoid, dysentery and malaria continued to sweep through the country. Deeply symptomatic of a country going nowhere, of opportunities scarcely presenting themselves to Spanish youth, almost a quarter of Spaniards simply never married. There was no future for them to look forward to. As a result of high death rates and a low birth rate, the population of Spain had increased by little more than half during the century. In the same period, the number of English had doubled. The two countries were not even in the same arena. In the light of this, Nelson’s famous insult to the Spanish has often been misinterpreted as pure racism. ‘The Dons may make fine ships,’ he wrote in 1793, ‘—they cannot however make men.’ But this is not, as it might sound, a reflection on Spanish virility. It is a description of a demographic fact. The supply of good, strong, well-fed men, with a high level of ambition and enterprise, was simply absent. ‘They have four first-rates in commission at Cadiz,’ Nelson went on, ‘and very fine ships, but shockingly manned. I am certain if our six barges’ crews, who are picked men, had got on board one of them, they would have taken her.’ He was probably right.

  Navies reflect the societies from which they come and at Cadiz in October 1805, Villeneuve, the French commander, was in despair about his Spanish allies. Their ships were in such poor condition, he reported to his friend Denis Decrès, Minister of Marine in Paris, that they should never have been sent to sea. Scurvy and dysentery were rife. One of the disadvantages from which Spain suffered, compared with its northern rivals, was the ability of tropical and Caribbean diseases to survive in the homeland. Yellow fever, which would habitually kill up to twenty per cent a year of the naval manpower of all nations when stationed in the Caribbean, could not survive the cold of southern England. In Spain it felt at home and Cadiz itself had been subject to a yellow fever epidemic that had been raging across the whole of southern Spain since the spring. More than a quarter of the thirty-six thousand people in Malaga, for example, had died of the sickness. With social systems collapsing across the whole of southern Spain, there was no food in Cadiz and few stores for refitting the ships. There was little money with which to pay crews, or any bounty for those who might be persuaded to volunteer. The people on board the Spanish ships, Villeneuve told Decrès, were ridiculous. Barely ten per cent were sailors. ‘It is truly painful to see such strong and beautiful ships manned with shepherds and beggars, and to have such a tiny number of real seamen. The fleet is not in a state to perform the services appointed to it. The Spanish are quite incapable of meeting the enemy.’ Intriguingly, the percentage of qualified seamen on British ships, when first leaving port, might not on occasions have been a great deal higher. The Spanish rarely put large fleets to sea but the British blue seas policy, pursued since the early 18th century, by which fleets were kept for years at a time blockading the ports of continental Europe, transformed those incompetent landmen into effective and coherent crews. On both sides, policy reinforced demography.

  In common with other European navies, the Spanish had more ships than they could man. Unavailability of skilled labour, rather than the lack of funds, limited the effectiveness and power of their navy. Like the French, the government had for fifty years organised a register of all acknowledged seamen, on whom the state could call in time of war. But, inevitably, in Spain as in France, the state did not have the mechanisms to enforce the scheme. The demands made by the register could be all too easily cheated. Poorly paid officials depended on bribes as an essential part of their income, and repeatedly the men did not appear. The savage discipline habitual in all navies—fifty strokes
while lashed to a cannon for the first attempt to desert; consignment to the galleys for the second—did little to encourage subscription.

  Vice-Admiral Jose de Mazarredo wrote to the King in May 1801, describing his predicament when finding himself at sea with no more than sixty sailors with any experience out of a crew of five hundred, the rest being fishermen and off coasting vessels ‘without training or any understanding whatsoever of a ship’s rigging or routine on board, such as securing a topgallant sail to the yardarm or taking in a reef.’ It was a stumbling, untrained mass of ill-assorted peasantry with which the aristocrats of the Spanish officer class put to sea in October 1805. Spanish gun crews were able to fire one round every five minutes from each of their 32lb cannon. Most British crews could manage a round every ninety seconds. The best could reduce that time by a third.

  The Spanish commander, Vice-Admiral Federico Carlos Gravina, was a Sicilian, and spoke a strongly accented Italian as his mother tongue—a trait he had in common with Napoleon—but his father, the Duke of San Miguel, was a Spanish grandee of the first class, as was his mother’s father. Gravina inherited the right on both his mother’s and his father’s side, to wear his hat in the presence of the King. He was, in many ways, an antique himself, laden with a sense of honour, duty and a particularly Spanish form of fatalism. ‘There are disasters that may be honoured as victory,’ the 19th-century Spanish nationalist Manuel Marliani later wrote of Trafalgar. It was a catastrophically self-fulfilling frame of mind.

  Threads and fragments of the European Enlightenment had found their way into Spain. The Spanish navy had conducted long exploratory scientific voyages through the Pacific, which bear comparison with those of James Cook on behalf of the British Admiralty; and there was, for example, a modern and efficiently run meteorological observatory outside Cadiz. But these were superficial changes. The traditional structures remained in place. Of the two hundred and twenty-seven ships built for the Spanish Royal Navy in the eighteenth century, a third of them had been named after saints, others after the Mother of Christ, several after key elements of church doctrine: the Spanish Royal Navy was proud of nothing more than the Salvador del Mundo, and the Purísima Concepción. Here at Trafalgar, the Santísima Trinidad, the largest ship in the world, was the flagship of Rear-Admiral don Bernardo Hidalgo Cisneros, the Santa Ana carried the flag of Vice-Admiral don Ignacio Maria de Alava. In the Spanish fleet, Catholicism and aristocracy clasped each other in an embrace of pure retrospection.

  The Spanish hierarchy had been exposed to, and clearly knew about, more modern approaches to war—and life—but didn’t take them up. After the execution of Louis XVI, Spain had been briefly allied with Britain against France. Gravina had visited Portsmouth in 1793 and had been introduced there to the extraordinarily beneficial effects that citrus juice could have on the health of sailors. The British sailors were known as ‘limeys’ for the very reason that they drank citrus juice drinks. Nelson would sip lemonade as he died. But Gravina ignored the advice. It was not what the Spaniards did. Lime and lemon juice was never introduced to the Spanish fleet and scurvy continued its wild career among their sad, impoverished crews.

  There was one final element in Spanish naval tradition that would on the day secure their defeat. The navy itself, despite playing the essential role in the creation and maintenance of the Spanish overseas empire, on whose income the Spanish state itself relied, was not regarded, as it was in England, as ‘the first service’. The theatre in which true nobility in Spanish arms could be enacted was on land. Seamanship, the handling and running of a ship, was considered secondary to the fighting that could be done once the sailors had manoeuvred the warriors into position. The captain of a Spanish ship did not concern himself with sailing matters. That was the business of a junior officer, the pilot, to whom all aspects of seamanship were delegated. The captain was in charge of the soldiers on board, of whom there were inordinate numbers. As a result, the Spanish men-of-war at Trafalgar were not ships but floating fortresses, castles in transit, commanded by a clique of officers for whom victory might have been preferable but who considered nothing more honourable than an exceptionally bloody defeat. On 20 October, Gravina listed the men on board his flagship, the Principe de Asturias: Infantry troops 382; marine artillerymen 172; officers and men 609. Even nominally, without taking into account the goatherds and the sweepings of Cadiz, almost half the men on board the Spanish flagship at Trafalgar were not seamen.

  Set against the Spanish pieties, the names of the French ships proclaimed a different culture: the great inheritance of Greek and Roman heroes, the beauties of France herself, the burning ardour of revolutionary zeal, the glories of empires which France had conquered and, like the masterpieces Napoleon was gathering in the Louvre, could adopt as her own. There was not a Christian idea or reference among them.

  In October 1805, though, there was some mismatch between the trumpeting of these glories and the actual condition of the fleet. The flagship, the Bucentaure, was named after the great gilded barge of the Doge of Venice, the ancient republic finally humiliated by Napoleon in 1797. But the Bucentaure had been struck by lightning and all her masts were in a fragile condition. Nor were there any timbers in Cadiz with which to replace them. She wasn’t alone in her fragility. Most of the ships of the French fleet had been sent to sea, as Villeneuve wrote to the Ministry, with ‘bad masts, bad sails and bad rigging’, and, overall, his account of the force under his command was full of unintended irony:

  The Formidable, the Mont Blanc, the Fougueux, [meaning the Ardent], and the Swiftsure [a ship captured from the British, and left with its earlier name as a taunt to the enemy] all need docking. The Scipion [the name of the two greatest and most aggressive of Roman generals] and the Aigle [the symbol of imperial dominance] want rerigging. The Pluton [the King of Hell] and the Héros can scarcely sail. The Indomptable, the Achille and the Berwick [another British capture] all have weak and incompetent crews.

  It was a depressing audit, the rhetoric floating free of the vessels it adorned. ‘There is not a ship,’ the admiral wrote, ‘with less than sixty sick on board.’

  These were not temporary aberrations. There were deep and systematic failures in French naval administration of which all this was the outward sign. There had been French successes in the past: they had been defeated by the British Royal Navy during the Seven Years War between 1757 and 1763, but after radical reorganisation and major investment had out-fought and out-manoeuvred the British during the American War of Independence. In the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which had begun in 1793, they, like the other Europeans, had been consistently defeated by the Royal Navy, and at an extraordinary cost in human lives. It has been calculated that in the six major battles between British fleets and their French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish enemies (First of June 1794, Cape St Vincent 1797, Camperdown 1797, The Nile 1798, Copenhagen 1801 and Trafalgar 1805) the British lost a total of 5,749 men killed and wounded, of whom 1,483 were killed in battle. In the same engagements, their enemies lost 38,970 killed, wounded and taken prisoner, of whom 9,068 were killed in battle itself, a figure over six times greater than the number of British dead.

  At Trafalgar that disproportion rose to an unprecedentedly high ratio of very nearly ten times the number of French and Spanish dead to English, but that Everest of slaughter was only the culmination of a consistent pattern. Over more than twelve years, in a wide variety of conditions and theatres of naval war, the British had savagely outkilled their opponents.

  Much of what follows will attempt to explain that imbalance, but there can be no doubt that the travails and evolutions of France herself were at least partly to blame. Before the Revolution, the French navy had been in far from perfect condition, without an effective central board of control—nothing to match the British Admiralty—and consistently struggling to source the large number of complex materials needed to equip a fleet. French shipbuilders had, throughout the 18th century, designed light, fast and efficient ships
, the envy of their British enemies and widely copied by them. But the sourcing of the necessary materials had consistently imposed strains which were not met. The 74-gun ship had by the end of the century become the workhorse of all navies—heavy enough to confront anything, fast enough to pursue any other ship-of-the-line. But to create a 74-gun ship required 100,000 cubic feet of timber for the hull, 168,000 pounds of hemp for the rigging, 33,750 pounds of copper to sheathe that hull, keeping it clean and fast, and 4,800 pounds of nails to fix the entire elaborate assemblage together. About 3,400 trees, from about 75 acres of woodland, were needed for each ship. Ninety per cent of that was oak, half of it straight, for the keel, stempost and the heavy planking; half of it curved, for the knees and breasthooks on which the integral strength of a ship-of-the-line relied.

  The supply system was the foundation of any navy and throughout the 1790s the British had applied the screw. Ship timber was being imported into Britain from the Adriatic, masts and hemp from North America, and large quantities of materials were carried from the Baltic. Decks were made of ‘good Prussia deals’ and the British Admiralty always specified that ‘all the Iron-work shall be wrought of the best Swedish iron’. By the end of the century, the number of British merchantmen sailing south from the Baltic to British ports had reached the astonishing total of 4,500 every year, the majority of them laden with naval stores: corn, tallow, hides, hemp and iron. Commerce was not only the purpose and prize of the long war against France; it was its method.

  The cost of the fleet to the British Treasury was enormous: in 1805 alone, £2.9 million was spent on the pay of the 107,000 seamen and marines in the Royal Navy; another £2.96 million on their food; but fully £4.68 million was spent on repairing the wear and tear of vessels which were maintaining the blockades around the European shores. By comparison, only £400,000 was spent on ordnance, on the guns and their shot which would do the damage at Trafalgar. It was the very bodies of the ships themselves, and the materials of which the ships were made, which imposed the financial strain, demanding from the British government more than a third of its total annual expenditure.