Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  If the regulated plan of attack had been adhered to, the English fleet should have borne up together, and have sailed in a line abreast in their respective divisions until they arrived up with the enemy. Thus the plan which consideration had matured would have been executed, than which perhaps nothing could have been better; the victory would have been more speedily decided, and the brunt of the action would have been more equally felt.

  Senhouse was no bewigged stick-in-the-mud; he had volunteered for the terrifying role of sailing fireships into the Combined Fleet still at anchor in Cadiz. Nevertheless, this is the non-Nelsonian voice of order, consideration and regulation. It is the 18th century addressing the spontaneity and near-anarchy of Nelson’s method. By the original plan, all except the lumpen sailers, the Britannia, Dreadnought and Prince, would have come into action at the same moment and the rear and centre of the Combined Fleet would have been crushed and eventually annihilated by the impact.

  But that wasn’t how Nelson did it on the day. Without forming into mutually supportive bodies of ships, the British fleet, raggedly arranged in its two columns, were even now being thrown into action like confetti at a wall, the difference being that this confetti was explosive and the wall far from strong. The reason for the British success at Trafalgar was not tactical. The tactics were immensely weak. The success depended on the independent ferocity and fighting aggression of each British ship and on the example of leadership given by Nelson to his captains. As Lieutenant Senhouse put it:

  The mode of attack, adopted with such success in the Trafalgar action, appears to me to have succeeded from the enthusiasm inspired throughout the British fleet from their being commanded by their beloved Nelson; from the gallant conduct of the leaders of the two divisions; from the individual exertions of each ship after the attack commenced, and the superior practice of the guns in the English fleet.

  In others words, love, honour, zeal and skill won the day. Without those qualities, this officer maintained, or even with them when faced with a resolved and skilful enemy, it is perfectly possible that Trafalgar would have been a catastrophe.

  Senhouse, after the event, allowed himself the luxury of imagining disaster. The two columns of the British fleet, in their slowness, are drifting down in the light airs towards the enemy. The day is calm and clear. The swell pushes through. All is alert. The bands are still playing. The British ships seem to hang, almost immobile, in front of the enemy cannon arrayed so thickly before them.

  The disadvantages of this mode of attack appear to consist in bringing forward the attacking force in a manner so leisurely and alternately, that an enemy of equal spirit and equal ability in seamanship and gunnery would have annihilated the ships one after another in detail, carried slowly on as they were by a heavy swell and light airs.

  He is expert enough to know what a British fleet would have done if they were defending against such an attack.

  At a distance of one mile, five ships, at half a cable’s length apart [100 yards] might direct their broadsides effectively against the head of the division for seven minutes, supposing the rate of sailing to have been four miles an hour; and within the distance of a half a mile three ships would do the same for seven minutes more, before the attacking ship could fire a gun in her defence.

  Assuming a firing rate of a broadside about every 90 seconds, and each broadside firing an average of 37 guns, the leading ship would in the space of about quarter of an hour be sailing through a block of air filled with about 1,000 roundshot, each one aimed at its hull and rigging. If the wind fell, or a sudden calm came on, the leading ships would, in Senhouse’s words ‘be sacrificed before the rear could possibly come to their assistance.’

  These are not the armchair thoughts of an amateur strategist reflecting much later on Trafalgar after all is over. This, among officers of the British fleet, is the quality of apprehension on the morning of Trafalgar itself. What is Nelson doing? Why does he not allow us to come up? What mad daring is this? How can he hope to survive? And among the French and Spanish, those questions must have been equally insistent. Nelson, for friend and enemy alike, was imposing exactly what he had told Keats a couple of months before: ‘I think it will surprise and confound the Enemy. They won’t know what I am about. It will bring forward a pell-mell Battle, and that is what I want.’

  Confusion and its attendant chaos was, for all his planning, Nelson’s chosen method of battle. He knew he would win like that, even if at some terrible cost to the British fleet. As the great 19th-century French naval historian Julien de la Gravière wrote, ‘Le génie de Nelson c’est d’avoir compris notre faiblesse.’ The genius of Nelson was to have understood our weakness. Or, as Miles Padfield has written more recently, the chaotic, piecemeal mode of attack adopted by Nelson at Trafalgar was ‘the tactics of disdain’.

  Everything was visible as they approached: the broadsides of the enemy, with their iron teeth turned towards them, now and then trying the range of a shot to gauge the distance, so that they might, ‘the moment we came within point blank (about six hundred yards) open their fire upon our van ships.’ The Santísima Trinidad, with four distinct lines of red painted the length of her hull between the gunports, was clearly seen about eleven ships back from the van of the Combined line. Nelson was driving his column towards her. On the Neptune, just behind him, one of Fremantle’s midshipmen, 16-year-old William Badcock, was gazing at the Spanish flagship,

  her head splendidly ornamented with a colossal group of figures, painted white, representing the Holy Trinity, from which she took her name. This magnificent ship was destined to be our opponent. She was lying to under topsails, top-gallant sails, royals, jib and spanker; her courses were hauled up; and her lofty towering sails looked beautiful, peering through the smoke, as she awaited the onset. The flags of France and Spain, both handsome, chequered the line, waving defiance to that of Britain.

  Everything on every ship was now in order. The galley fires had been extinguished, flashproof screens made of thick woollen cloth known as ‘fearnought’ had been fitted around the hatchways through which powder from the magazines, where it was stowed in copper-hooped barrels which would make no sparks, would be passed; the shot racks in which the 18lb, 24lb and 32lb balls were stored had been drawn out from under their usual coverings; the guns, usually triced up tight to prevent movement at sea, had been cast loose. Crowbars—handspikes—used to lift and point the guns were lying at hand beside them on the decks. Goats and pigs had been sent down to the cable tier, the deepest and most protected level on the ships; the captain’s ducks and geese were more often left in the coops to take their chance; Collingwood didn’t move his pigs from their sty and they were killed during the battle. In the near lightless depths of the cockpit on the orlop deck, sails were spread out on chests, the surgeon’s saws, knives, probes, bandages and tourniquets all put in order. The surgeon’s task, as the Admiralty described it, was ‘to be prepared for the reception of wounded men, and himself and his mates and assistants are to be ready and have everything at hand for stopping their blood and dressing their wounds.’ The carpenter and his crew were ready down below with shot boards and plugs of wood with which to repair underwater damage from enemy fire.

  Silence prevailed as the men and boys stood to their guns. Men tightened their handkerchiefs around their heads. On the leading ships, shot fell short alongside and then went over. Then, in Victory, a shot went clean through the main topgallant sail. Then seven or eight ships opened fire on her, ‘a heavy and unremitting cannonade’ and within a minute or two, as Dr Scott, Nelson’s secretary, was speaking to Captain Hardy on the quarterdeck, a roundshot killed him. That is casually said, but what exactly happened when a cannonball hit a body?

  It could cut a man in two; it could remove his head or any one of his limbs, not neatly but leaving a ragged tear where the limb had been. The man died either through sheer destruction of life-critical tissue—the hammocks in their netting were spattered with it—or through the rapid
loss of very large quantities of blood. For a few moments, the heart might respond to the trauma by increasing the pulse-rate, but that response would only have the effect of killing the victim faster. Scott’s blood would have pumped out all over the quarter-deck, his flesh would have begun to turn pale, his mashed remains would have been thrown over the side, and the only memory of this sophisticated, multi-lingual, doggedly loyal man, who wrote letters to Emma on Nelson’s behalf, would have been a pool of blood on Victory’s pale deck timbers of Prussian deal.

  ‘Is that poor Scott who has gone?’ Nelson asked, suddenly looking round, a question that reveals how death could appear so casually here; a man Nelson knew as well as any other, walking on his quarterdeck, speaking to his captain, and then, in the next instant gone, not lying there as an elegant corpse, but his identity erased, his body not butchered or hurt but mangled and distorted, a muddle of blood and bone and half-human features where a man had been.

  When Victory was 500 yards from the enemy line, her mizzen topmast was shot away. Another shot struck and destroyed the wheel. Within another two minutes, a double-headed shot—a heavy, stubby bar of metal which spun through the air—sliced through a line of eight marines, killing every one of them. Yet another smashed into a launch, hit the deck of the Victory and a splinter flew towards where Hardy and Nelson were walking on the quarterdeck. It tore off the buckle from Hardy’s left shoe.

  They both instantly stopped, and were observed by the Officers on deck to survey each other with inquiring looks, each supposing the other to be wounded. His Lordship then smiled and said, ‘This is too warm work, Hardy, to last long.’

  For young Lieutenant Nicolas on the Belleisle, newly challenged to the display of phlegm, war became suddenly horrifying:

  The shot began to pass over us and gave us an intimation of what we should in a few minutes undergo. A shriek soon followed—a cry of agony was produced by the next shot—and the loss of the head of a poor recruit was the effect of the succeeding, and as we advanced, destruction rapidly increased. A severe contusion on the breast now prostrated our Captain, but he soon resumed his station. Those only who have been in a similar situation to the one I am attempting to describe can have a correct idea of such a scene. My eyes were horrorstruck at the bloody corpses around me, and my ears rang with the shrieks of the wounded and the moans of the dying.

  On the decks of the Belleisle a dozen men lay dead. Ten more were wounded and in the hands of the surgeon far below. Between the decks, at least protected by the thickness of the oak, there was nevertheless tangible fear: no noise, no laughter, no show of hilarity; perhaps some jokes but nothing more. Men stood there listening, or peering out through the gunports to judge the distance. ‘I felt a difficulty in swallowing,’ one sailor, Charles Pemberton, remembered of just such an attack a few years later.

  Now if we had gone at it at once, without this chilling prelude, why I dare say I should have known very little about that thing which we call fear. ‘Stand to your guns!’ at last came in a peal through the stillness from the captain’s speaking trumpet; it swept fore and aft with such clear force, as though it had been spoken within a foot of the ear, and seemed to dash down into the holds, and penetrate to the very keel. Take good aim! Ready the first platoon. Ready? Aye, every one was ready; stern, fixed, rigid, in soul—pliant, elastic in body

  When at sea, the drummer beat the men to quarters every night. The entire ship knew what its fighting quarters were, eight men and a boy to the lightest guns, fifteen of them to the heavy 32-pounders, and they habitually sang to the drummed rhythm.

  Not now though. All is perfect death-like silence. The guns have been shotted and the slow-matches lit and placed in their tubs, a stand-by system in case the flintlocks misfired. The lieutenants have been through the decks, reminding the marines and those seamen who are designated as boarders, what to do if they were ordered to board the enemy. Pikes, cutlasses, and pistols have been issued and stowed. Buckets of good sweet drinking water and tubs of cinders or sand, for when the deck becomes wet or slippery, have been placed between each pair of guns. Behind them the grape and canister, the roundshot, the waddings, the powder cartridges and the powder horn are all laid out according to designated patterns. Pistols are kept ready in case a gun should fail to discharge when the flintlock is released. If a gun ‘hangs fire’ like that, a ‘pistol with half a cartridge of powder fired slantway down the touch hole of the gun will always discharge the gun.’ As it does so, a burst of blame drives up from that touch hole and scorches the deck beams above. The captains have toured all parts and urged the men ‘to courage and duty’.

  On the Neptune, Thomas Fremantle speaks to his men at their different quarters. They were to think of their country, and all that was dear to them. The fate of England, as Able Seaman James Martin remembered Fremantle’s words

  Hung upon a Ballance and their Happyness Depended upon us and their Safty also Happy the Man who Boldly Venture his Life in such a Cause if he shold Survive the Battle how Sweet will be the Recolection and if he fall he fall Covred with Glory and Honnor and Morned By a Greatfull Country the Brave Live Gloryous and Lemented Die

  That’s why Nelson loved Fremantle: because Fremantle loved England and everything in it and understood what might be called the ‘Achilles Deal’ which Nelsonian battle required. What Martin may not have realised is that Fremantle was remembering the inspirational words he had read in Pope’s translation of the Iliad, Book V, in which Diomed addresses the Greek warriors:

  Ye Greeks, be men! the charge of battle bear;

  Your brave associates and yourselves revere!

  Let glorious acts more glorious acts inspire,

  And catch from breast to breast the noble fire!

  On valour’s side the odds of combat lie,

  The brave live glorious, or lamented die;

  Men were stationed in the tops—narrow platforms on each mast which gave an overview of neighbouring ships—their duty both to trim the sails and, in some ships, to fire down with muskets on the enemy poop and quarterdeck if it came to close action. Others on the forecastle and poop had as their task the handling of the sails during the battle: to back the topsails if the ship needed to lose way, to haul on the braces of the great yards if the ship was to tack or wear. Every man was at his quarters. The moment of intimacy was upon them.

  Part II

  Battle

  October 21st 1805

  12.30 pm to 5 pm

  6

  Violence

  October 21st, 1805

  12.30 pm to 2.15 pm

  War: the exercise of violence under sovereign command

  against withstanders

  SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755

  Every man stood in the quiet of terror and discipline waiting for the first noise of battle. When it came, it sounded, it was said, ‘like the tearing of sails, just over our heads.’ But nothing except the air was being torn: this was simply ‘the wind of the enemy’s shot’, a passage of metal at speed through air. If it passed close enough to you, it could, without touching, kill, merely with the shock of the pressure wave that a travelling projectile creates. Unblemished men would fall dead on the deck as the roundshot passed. Others, extraordinarily, found their clothes on fire. The level of noise grew to a pitch nothing else in life could match. Each ship trembled, deep into its frames and keel, with the reverberation of its own guns firing. The ship was a place of yelling, the guns roaring, the blocks and tackles with which they were hauled out through the gunports and manoeuvred to bear on the enemy, screaming and squealing like pigs on the point of slaughter. The noise of ingoing and outgoing fire could scarcely be distinguished. From within the lower decks of the ships, enemy shot could be heard striking on the hull and bouncing away, but all part of a maniacal frenzy of noise, ‘like some awfully tremendous thunder-storm, whose deafening roar is attended by incessant streaks of lightning, carrying death in every flash and strewing the ground with the victi
ms of its wrath: only, in our case, the scene was rendered more horrible than that, by the presence of torrents of blood which dyed our decks.’

  No account survives of the experience in detail of the gunfight at Trafalgar, but in its place can be put the words of a thirteen-year-old powder-monkey called Samuel Leech, who experienced a brutal frigate action in the 1812 war against the United States. Leech was a political radical, deeply distrustful of the violent methods of navy discipline and of the inadequacy of the officer class. Something of that political and social rage undoubtedly colours his account but does not entirely devalue it. About a third of the crew of his frigate was either killed or wounded in the action against a large American, armed with more and heavier guns. Here, in Leech’s words, almost uniquely is the atmosphere between decks in the days of sailing battle. It is a scene of unequivocal horror. The firing has already begun:

  I was busily supplying my gun with powder, when I saw blood suddenly fly from the arm of a man stationed at our gun. I saw nothing strike him; the effect alone was visible; in an instant, the third lieutenant tied his handkerchief round the wounded arm, and sent the groaning wretch below to the surgeon.

  In this, as in most battles, cause and effect seem scarcely to relate. The damage seems to emerge from the air itself.

  The cries of the wounded now rang through all parts of the ship. These were carried to the cockpit as fast as they fell, while those more fortunate men, who were killed outright, were immediately thrown overboard. As I was stationed but a short distance from the main hatchway, I could catch a glance at all who were carried below. A glance was all I could indulge in, for the boys belonging to the guns next to mine were wounded in the early part of the action, and I had to spring with all my might to keep three or four guns supplied with cartridges. I saw two of these lads fall nearly together. One of them was struck in the leg by a large shot; he had to suffer amputation above the wound. The other had a grape or canister shot sent through his ankle. A stout Yorkshireman lifted him in his arms and hurried him to the cockpit. He had his foot cut off, and was thus made lame for life. Two of the boys stationed on the quarter deck were killed. They were both Portuguese. A man, who saw one of them killed, afterwards told me that his powder caught fire and burnt the flesh almost off his face. In this pitiable situation, the agonized boy lifted up both hands, as if imploring relief, when a passing shot instantly cut him in two.