Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  Everything in the hull was for strength. The frames or ribs of the ship were set in pairs along its full width, and carefully jointed so that no joint in any timber lay alongside a joint in another. It was a dense structure. If you stripped away the outer shell, the frames would still occupy two thirds of its outline. The whole structure was held together by iron bolts above the waterline and by bolts made of copper alloy below it. The hull was clenched into tightness. The underwater profile was sheathed in copper to keep it clean of weed, a form of anti-fouling and to deter the ship worm which destroys ship timbers in the tropics.

  This immensely solid hull was then bridged internally with the heavy deck beams, huge oak timbers, each one placed beneath a gun, cambered slightly to meet the curve of the deck (cambered so that water would run off it) and fixed with grown-oak knees—cut from the curving part of a tree—which held the beams in place in both the vertical and horizontal plane. Over that was laid the deal deck planking, each plank two inches thick and 12 inches wide. The final element was the hull planking, several layers of it: particularly thick timbers known as wales fixed under each row of gunports, further thickening timbers above and below the wales, a mass of exterior planking, four inches thick, followed by interior planking of the same density, and on top of that, still further timbers known as riders and standards to give yet more internal strength. The construction method is more like that of a tank armoured in oak than a seagoing vessel. A first-rate ship like Victory might take ten years to construct. At their thickest, its walls would be three feet thick.

  That was only the beginning: steering systems, capstans, anchors and pumps, the captain’s great cabin or in the greatest ships the admiral’s apartment, the galley, the sick room, the powder magazine—42,000 lbs of gunpowder in 405 barrels aboard Victory—the water storage and the iron ballasting, the pens for the bullocks, pigs, chickens and sheep that were kept on board, the stores for bread, salt meat and the all-important lemons and limes (18,000 for one ship at a single loading) all had to be fitted out for this 850-man war machine to operate.

  Above all that, of course, was the rig. Nothing looks more complicated or more idiosyncratic than the maze of lines, canvas and timber that stretch skyward above these ships. Victory is 186 feet long on her gundecks, 51 wide at her widest point. The poop is already 55 feet above the keel. The truck on the mainmast, the very highest point of the ship, is another 170 feet above that. Every cubic yard of space above those decks is put to work but in a system whose essence is clear and plain. There are three masts and each carries four square sails: the ‘course’ at the bottom—the mainsail, whose name means ‘the body’; the topsail above it, its name deriving from the time when it was simply the upper of two sails; the ‘topgallant’ above that, and above that the ‘royal’. The bowsprit, protruding 100 feet from the bow, carried four jibs. Between the fore and the mainmast and between the mainmast and the mizzen, still further fore-and-aft staysails—attached to the stays holding up the masts—could be set. Extra studding sails could be hoisted, attached to special booms run out on each side from the yards from which the usual sails hung.

  In all, a ship like Victory could carry 40 sails, with about 1,000 blocks through which the rigging was led, the whole assemblage weighing about twenty tons and covering an area of more than two acres. Although no element of these extraordinary constructions would have been unfamiliar to anyone alive in 1805—no special materials; nothing different in the hemp and canvas, iron and timber, blocks and pulleys from those found on land—the man-of-war, as complex as a clock, as large as a prison, as delicate as a kite, as strong as a fortress and as murderous as an army, was undoubtedly the most evolved single mechanism, with the most elaborate ordering of parts, the world had ever seen.

  That was the striking fact. One witness after another described the overriding sensation they had on the morning of Trafalgar: the sense of beautiful order; the knowledge of preparedness; of the soundness of hull and spar; of standing and running rigging fully knotted and deeply spliced; of the rope work wormed, served and tarred; of the roundshot in their wooden cups stacked behind the great guns; of the powder cartridges ready far below, the crews in their allocated places; the weekly practice at gunnery known and understood.

  The fleet itself, and each ship within it, just as much as a contemporary dockyard or factory, or even the new efficient prisons, was seen by all as an evolving and gyrating machine.

  For every task, from getting up the anchor to unbending the sails, aloft and below, at the mess tub or in the hammock, each task has its man and each man his place. A ship contains a set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of the machinist—the all-powerful captain.

  Late in September, on arriving back after a short rest in England, Nelson had written to the unsatisfactory and ailing Rear-Admiral John Knight in Gibraltar:

  I was only twenty-five days, from dinner to dinner, absent from the Victory. In our several situations, my dear Admiral, we must all put our shoulders to the wheel, and make the great machine of the Fleet intrusted to our charge go on smoothly.

  The phrase ‘great machine’ had a richer resonance in 1805 than it does today. The Newtonian universe was a machine. Beauty, as Newton had revealed, was systematic. The interlocking, gyrating cogwheeled spheres of the orrery were a model of how things were. No one element could matter more than the system of which it was a part. The universe, in one part of the 18th-century mind, was a uniquely ordered affair, a smoothly clarified machine of exquisitely oiled parts, whose majesty consisted in its rationality. God, it had become clear, did not feel, intuit or imagine. He thought.

  As a reflection of that, machines were what grandees loved to visit. The opening of the Albion Steam Mill in March 1786 on the south bank of the Thames in London had been accompanied by a grand masquerade. Dukes, lords and ladies flocked to it. Lords Auckland, Lansdowne and Penrhyn were given tours by Matthew Boulton the great steam machinist and entrepreneur. The East India Company directors were there, as was the President of the Royal Society. A distinguished French Académicien, the Marquis de Coulomb, was caught doing a little industrial espionage on the side. The machine then was still a model of what might be, the image of dynamic exactness, of undeluded inventiveness harnessing natural forces, which not only mimicked the workings of the universe but stepped outside the limits which human muscle had always imposed on human enterprise.

  That was at the heart of the machine’s allure: it was rational potency, an enlargement of the possibilities of life. When James Boswell had visited Birmingham in 1776, he made a beeline for the works belonging to Boulton at Soho. Boswell stood amazed at the scale and energy of the ‘Manufactory’ where 700 people were employed (almost exactly the number on a ship-of-the-line) and regretted that Dr Johnson was not there with him

  for it was a scene which I should have been glad to contemplate by his light. The vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery would have ‘matched his mighty mind’. I shall never forget Mr Bolton’s expression to me. ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.’

  It is an analogy that is everywhere in the navy. Lord Barham, First Lord of the Admiralty, a carping, wheedling, occasionally intemperate and unattractive man, who never hesitated to wag the finger, nor remind his superiors of the length, intensity and importance of his labours, who congratulated himself on ‘having naturally a methodical turn of mind’, saw his job simply as ‘keeping the engine moving’. As he wrote to Pitt on 22 May 1805, ‘I thought it right to lay these few ideas before you, that, if possible, the whole machine should be made to move a little brisker, so as to afford us some prospect of success. We may flatter ourselves, from what has passed, that our skill in the management of ships and the activity and bravery of our seamen will bear us out; it is a fallacy, which will manifest itself in a few months if we are not furnished with men for our ships.’

  Work, b
usiness, the oiling of the machine, and the keeping of the wheels turning, the provision of men by the press gangs, of timber, tar, and flax, from America, the Baltic and the Far East: that was Barham’s task. In the making of its ropes, the Royal Navy was thought to consume 14,935 tons of hemp a year. For its sails 95,585 bolts of canvas were required. Barham ensured that teak-built battleships were commissioned in Bombay, and both light frigates and ships-of-the-line from the Russians in the White Sea in Archangel. Supplies of English oak were running desperately thin, as they were all over Europe. Large loads of central and eastern European oak, carted to Baltic ports and then trans-shipped to England, were found on arrival to be useless. The navy surveyors were told they ‘must cordially agree to substituting elm, fir, beech and any other timber for oak, where it can be used.’ England must be scoured, as Barham had written in a memo entitled Forethought and Preparation and ‘Country gentlemen, and others who have small quantities to sell must be canvassed.’ He was keen to show anyone who would listen ‘the advantages of forethought and preparation in every kind of business and more particularly in naval matters. By such means an enemy is overpowered before he can prepare himself.’ His task was ‘to take the whole business upon myself until the machine was set agoing.’ Whoever decides the disposition of forces ‘must be a perfect master of arrangement. Without this, he must be in continual perplexity.’

  Orderliness was in the air. Over 200 English grammars had been published in the second half of the 18th century, by which the wild sprouts of the language were to be disciplined and trained. The water closet with a ball-cock to control the inrush of water into the cistern had been invented in 1778. Public hangings at Tyburn in the west end of London had been done away with in 1783. Branding of criminals had been abolished. The Ordnance Survey, by which every inch of the British Isles was to be precisely triangulated, surveyed and mapped, had been founded in 1793. Income tax had been imposed by Pitt for the first time in 1798. Deduction at source had followed two years later. The first National Census had been conducted in 1801. A year later Thomas Telford had spanned the Thames in one leap with the new London Bridge. In 1803 Luke Howard had named the clouds for the first time. The numbering of London houses became compulsory in 1805. In January 1806, on station off the coast of South America, Captain Francis Beaufort developed the first version of the Beaufort scale by which, ever since, wind has been calibrated in precise increments.

  The entire value system of a figure such as Barham was based not on the Nelsonian virtues of dash, inspiration and the heroic but on understanding, reason, clarity and order. Barham’s cousin and predecessor at the Admiralty Lord Melville had declared that his purpose was ‘to know with perfect accuracy the real state of the British navy as it now stands, with reference as well to the immediate calls upon it, as with a view to its progressive improvement to meet future contingencies. It is my duty to communicate the result of my investigation, for the information of his Majesty and his confidential servants.’ Latinate, explicit, attentive, prospective, urgent: this language forms the essential bedrock on which the fleets of 1805, the victory at Trafalgar and the 19th-century idea of the English hero were all laid.

  It was, at some intuitive level, an appreciation of the fleet which had penetrated deep into English national consciousness. The navy was beautiful, substantial, orderly and English. Wordsworth would stand on the Dorset shore and stare, as his sister Dorothy wrote to their brother, ‘at the West India fleet sailing in all its glory.’ William Cobbett, as a boy, had felt his entire sense of being shift into another plane when, in the 1770s,

  from the top of Portsdown, I, for the first time, beheld the sea, and no sooner did I behold it than I wished to be a sailor. But it was not the sea alone that I saw: the grand fleet was riding at anchor at Spithead. I had heard of the wooden walls of Old England: I had formed my ideas of a ship, and of a fleet; but what I now beheld, so far surpassed what I had ever been able to form a conception of, that I stood lost between astonishment and admiration. I had heard talk of all the glorious deeds of our admirals and sailors [which] good and true Englishmen never fail to relate to their children about a hundred times a year. The sight of the fleet brought all these into my mind in confused order, it is true, but with irresistible force. My heart was inflated with national pride. The sailors were my countrymen; the fleet belonged to my country, and surely I had my part in it, and in all its honours…

  The beauty and power which so struck the young Cobbett also lay behind the great sequence of sea-pieces which JMW Turner was painting in London in the first decade of the 19th century. To see them, thousands of people crowded every year into the 70-foot-long gallery the painter had attached to his house in Harley Street. He had opened it to the public for free, both to promote himself and as a service to the nation. In all of these early sea-paintings, again and again, the roughness of the sea, its turbulence and incipient anarchy, is set against the very opposite: the impassive, dark, stable shapes of the men-of-war anchored within it, the moment of solidity in a world of thrashing light, indifferent to anything which the sea, or trouble itself, could throw at them.

  These works by the young Turner are the great English conservative images of the age. They are anti-Romantic pictures. Europe itself is in turmoil; the settled ways of things have been thrown into a stir; and at times alone, at times as the controlling node in a network of alliances across the continent, England, for the English, remains the bastion of reliability and strength. That is what the great black blocks of Turner’s ships embody. He rarely, in these years, paints the men-of-war in motion, let alone in action. That is not their role. They are the wooden walls, the irreducible strength of England standing impervious to the chaos which revolutionary France threatened from across the channel.

  The fleet at Trafalgar represented fifteen per cent of the British armed strength at sea, no more than the fighting tip of an organisation spread across the whole of the eastern Atlantic. That was the deep and underlying order on which British defence relied. Lord Barham wrote to the King on the eve of Trafalgar describing ‘the present disposition of that part of your majesty’s fleet now in commission.’ The accumulated strength was rolled off with some pride: there were blockading fleets off French and Spanish ports, a home defence fleet in the Downs off the Kent coast, ships-of-the-line off Ireland and the Dutch coast, squadrons of frigates between Ireland and Brittany, between Brittany and the north Spanish coast, south along the Spanish coast to Capes St Vincent and Trafalgar, and on into the Mediterranean, some 180 ships-of-the-line in all and twice that number of frigates. Further ships, in port, were preparing to relieve those on station. Men were being pressed to man them, supplies imported to equip them.

  Perhaps Barham, aware of the fragility of George III’s mind, was consciously portraying a situation of extraordinary coherence and regularity, evidence of Barham’s own foresight and preparedness over the previous 12 months. It was certainly, in this ideal form, a system designed to reassure a king. The task facing Barham was the same as the one that had faced British strategists for centuries. On the Atlantic shores of Europe, the British navy faced the French army. Strength in two different spheres confronted each other. It was a war, as Napoleon famously said, between an elephant and a whale. If France was to defeat her ancient enemy, she needed to invade England across the narrow seas of the Straits of Dover. In response, England needed to control those seas so as to prevent the invasion occurring. The single aim for British naval policy was to control the all-important access to the western approaches of the English Channel.

  Napoleon wanted to destroy Britain, whose government was funding the continental alliances against him. ‘There are in Europe many good generals but they see too many things at once,’ he had said. ‘I see only one thing, namely the enemy’s main body. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves.’ The central matter was the invasion of England, or at least its destruction as a world power. ‘Bah!’ Marshal Masséna was said
to have remarked years later when asked about the conquest of Britain. ‘Conquer it? No one even dreamt of it. It was just a question of ruining it; of leaving it in a condition that no one would even have wanted to possess it.’ Napoleon thought that once in England he could destroy it in three weeks: ‘Invade, enter London, wreck the shipyards and demolish the arsenals of Portsmouth and Plymouth.’ Then he could march on Vienna. His army for the task, when fully arrayed, stretched nine miles along the sands of Boulogne.

  The heart of the problem for the French is that France has few good deep-water ports. Unlike England, which in the harbours of Falmouth, Plymouth and Portsmouth, and in the capacious anchorages of the Nore (in the estuary of the Medway, just south of the Thames) the Downs (just east of Dover) and Spithead (off the Isle of Wight) has room for several world-dominating battle-fleets; France on its Atlantic and Channel coasts has only Brest, and to a lesser extent Rochefort; and on its Mediterranean coast, Toulon. Extravagant attempts before the Revolution to construct a fleet-holding harbour at Cherbourg in Normandy had been abandoned for lack of money.

  That geography had governed the naval strategy of the European powers throughout the 18th century. The British need was to pin the French inside their ports; the French to escape the blockades imposed upon them, unite and come in force to dominate the Channel where an invasion could be made. The line connecting Brest to Toulon, via the Strait of Gibraltar, was the battleground on which the naval contest between the great European powers was fought out. Cape Trafalgar is on that line, at one of its hinges, just west of the Strait of Gibraltar, and just south of the great southern Spanish port of Cadiz.

  Those were the unchangeable facts. There were of course many more wings and complexities to them: the eastern Mediterranean and the role of the Turks and the Russians there; the position of Egypt as the gateway to India; in the North Sea the role of the Dutch and Danes, and of the Russians in the Baltic; the need for the British to protect Ireland on their Atlantic flank; the inviting vulnerability of the French and British possessions in the Caribbean; the power added to the French naval position by the Spanish coming into the war against the British in January 1805, adding—on the all-important Brest-Toulon route—the outstanding deep-water harbours at Vigo, Ferrol and Cadiz.