Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  At the same time, on the starboard side of the Royal Sovereign, the French Fougueux turned her port broadside on to the invading Englishman. On this side too, the Sovereign replied, her huge weight of iron slamming into the smaller Fougueux. Pierre Servaux was the master-atarms on board:

  She gave us a broadside from fifty-five guns and her carronades, belching out a storm of cannon shot, big and small, and musket-shot. I thought the Fougueux must be shattered, pulverised into tiny pieces. The storm of missiles that was driven against and through the hull on the port side made the ship heel to starboard. The larger part of the sails and the rigging was cut to pieces, while the upper deck was swept clear of most of the seamen who were working there and of the marksmen. On the gundecks below, there was less damage. There, not more than thirty men were put out of action. This preliminary greeting, rough and brutal as it was, did not dishearten our men. A well-maintained fire showed the Englishmen that we too had guns and could use them.

  Servaux’s cool-headed account of that first blast of the iron wind from a British ship-of-the-line is revealing on several counts. There is, to begin with, the sheer volume of aggressive metal which the big three-decker can deliver. Initial shock, conveyed by hugely powerful ships at the head of the two columns, was central to Nelson’s scheme. It established a devastating advantage from which recovery was nearly impossible. But Servaux also makes clear two crucial facts about this form of attack. First, the effect of raking fire and the effect of a broadside received broadside-on is the difference between a battle and a slaughter. Raking fire, poured through the stern or bow of a ship, encountered no obstacle on its way. It met the vulnerable bodies of men and guns as violently as it had left the muzzles from which it had been fired. But gunfire which had to punch its way through the oak walls of the enemy ship could have no such effect. Its killing power was blunted by the density of the wooden defences. Even a broadside that drove the receiving ship over with the impact, as if caught in a vicious squall, did not disable a ship in the way that the Santa Ana was smashed by the raking fire on the Sovereign’s other broadside. Sailing skill, sheer deftness of manoeuvre and the alacrity with which crews would jump to instructions, either turning the ship into a position where it could rake its enemy, or turn itself away from raking fire, were the factors on which life or death depended.

  Further than that, in Servaux’s words, the difference could not be clearer between the horror of exposure on the upper decks—the forecastle, the quarterdeck and the poop—and the relative safety of the oak-bulwarked gundecks below. Those upper decks were where the leading figures of the ship needed to be during the battle. Captains, first lieutenants, and masters were all to be found on the quarterdeck, boatswains, other petty officers and prime seamen on the forecastle, marine officers on the poop. These places were where the killing and wounding was done and so among these ranks, in ship after ship, the proportion of casualties often rose to well over a third or even a half. The more significant the man at Trafalgar, the more vulnerable he was.

  These conditions were common to all sides, given the current technology. Why, one might ask, did the commanders not have constructed for themselves a quarterdeck shelter, in which they might be as protected from shot and musket-fire as those on the decks below them? Was self-exposure so central a part of the code of honour that a sailing ship-of-the-line, governed as these were, would not in fact have been operable in battle without it? It may be, at some subliminal level, that this self-sacrificial style of command also fed into the fighting capacity of ships. If his officers were prepared to expose themselves to so much danger, then what could a man do but follow their lead? It is precisely the opposite of generals commanding later battles from many tens of miles behind the front. Here the commanders placed themselves on the point of the spear.

  It was not a complicated method, it was inherently bloody and it meant that officers needed to wait in the danger zone for long periods while the great guns did their work. That long period of exposure was an inescapable part of the theatre of battle. They had no protection, beyond the hammocks in their netting containers on either side of the quarterdeck, and the horizontal nets drawn taut above their heads to save them from falling debris. Neither was any use against roundshot, langridge or musket-fire. And the theatrical role played by honour, combined with the style of personal leadership Nelson had developed, meant that neither he nor any other officer could hide. Exposure of the person was more than an inherent hazard; it was an essential part of the task.

  But there is one further and governing point which emerges from Pierre Servaux’s words: a deep, inbuilt sense of inferiority. They were not ‘disheartened’ by the brutal aggression. They could show the Englishmen that they had guns too. That is the language of defeat, of keeping one’s end up, of showing the better man that you are a man too. In that innermost, erosive doubt much of the outcome of Trafalgar is decided.

  Collingwood was many minutes ahead of the next ship behind him, the Belleisle. Gathering to the aid of the Santa Ana, French and Spanish ships clustered like wasps around the intruder: the Fougueux raked the Royal Sovereign from astern; the San Leandro from ahead; the San Justo was cannonading her from 300 yards off her starboard bow; the Indomptable from off her starboard quarter. Shots were perfectly visible as they came towards the men on board, at least from the upper decks, and in these few minutes, so many were being fired at the Royal Sovereign that the crew frequently saw shots from different ships collide, or glance off each other, as if in a game of demonic aerial billiards. But the Royal Sovereign stuck to her guns. Once past the stern of the Santa Ana, Collingwood turned hard to port and ranged his ship right alongside the Spanish flagship.

  Muzzle to muzzle for about two hours they fired man-killing shots into each other’s bellies. The British fired perhaps eighty broadsides in that time, the Spanish perhaps twenty-five or thirty. The aim was not to sink the other ship but to kill the other crew, or at least enough of them for their officers to consider any continuation hopeless, and those mathematics are the facts on which victory was founded. By about 2.15, the officers of the Santa Ana decided to surrender. Her starboard side, next to the Sovereign’s guns, had been ‘very nearly beaten in’ by the shot fired into it. Nearly all her officers were dead or wounded and they surrendered, as was the convention, by hauling down her flag. At almost the same moment, the mizzenmast on the Royal Sovereign collapsed, shot through by the fire of the five ships which had surrounded her. A few minutes later, the mainmast followed, leaving only the foremast standing, and that, as the expression of the time had it, ‘tottering and wounded’. Records and figures of dead and wounded on French and Spanish ships are sketchy, but on the British ships exact. There were 47 men dead on the Sovereign and 95 wounded, half of them severely, out of a ship’s company of about 600. The Spanish had inflicted casualties at a rate of about 25%; the British had probably killed or wounded about 50% of the enemy. That is the winning difference.

  The Belleisle strode in after the Royal Sovereign, through the same gap Collingwood had entered, and the Belleisle again savaged the Santa Ana from astern, another double-shotted load with a canister of grape shot on top of them. These methods of warfare do not aim at individual destruction; they make environments murderous. The air between decks in a well-raked ship was as unsurvivable as any No-Man’s-Land over which machine guns played.

  On all ships engaged in this form of brutal action, winning or losing, the damage was horrifying. ‘I now went below,’ Samuel Leech wrote of his encounter with a heavily armed American frigate in 1812, after his own outgunned ship had surrendered,

  to see how matters appeared there. The first object I met was a man bearing a limb, which had just been detached from some suffering wretch. Pursuing my way to the ward-room, I necessarily passed through the steerage, which was strewed with the wounded: it was a sad spectacle, made more appalling by the groans and cries which rent the air. Some were groaning, others were swearing most bitterly, a few were praying,
while those last arrived were begging most piteously to have their wounds dressed next. The surgeon and his mate were smeared with blood from head to foot: they looked more like butchers than doctors.

  Here the sea was full of the bodies of scorched, butchered and mangled people. On board the defeated ships, the scene confronting the British officers was one of cinematic horror. A British midshipman went on board the Santísima Trinidad:

  She had between 3 and 400 killed and wounded, her Beams where coverd with Blood, Brains, and pieces of Flesh, and the after part of her Decks with wounded, some without Legs and some without an Arm; what calamities War brings on, and what a number of Lives where put an end to on the 21st.

  The companionway steps, leading down from deck to deck, were in the most brutalised ships so covered in blood that you could hardly walk on them without slipping. Nor is the sense of revulsion a modern reaction. ‘Such was the horror that filled’ the mind of the chaplain on board the Victory, the Rev. Dr Scott,

  that it haunted him like a shocking dream for years afterwards. He never talked of it. Indeed the only record of a remark on the subject was one extorted from him by the inquiries of a friend, soon after his return home. The expression that escaped him at the moment was, ‘it was like a butcher’s shambles.’

  Lieutenant William Ram of the Victory was brought down into the cockpit where the surgeons were working on the wounded. Ram was not aware as he was carried down below quite how desperate his condition was. The surgeon looked at him and the young man was told the seriousness of his wound.

  On discovering it, he tore off with his own hand the ligatures that were being applied, and bled to death. Almost frenzied by the sight of this, Scott hurried wildly to the deck for relief, perfectly regardless of his own safety. He rushed up the companion-ladder, now slippery with gore, to the scene above [where] all was noise, confusion, and smoke.

  On board the Leviathan,

  a shot took off the arm of Thomas Main, when at his gun on the forecastle; his messmates kindly offered to assist him in going to the Surgeon; but he bluntly said, ‘I thank you stay where you are; you will do more good there:’ he then went down by himself to the cockpit. The Surgeon (who respected him) would willingly have attended him, in preference to others whose wounds were less alarming; but Main would not admit of it, saying ‘Avast, not until it come to my turn if you please.’ The Surgeon soon after amputated the shattered part of the arm, near the shoulder; during which, with great composure, smiling, and with a clear steady voice, he sang the whole of ‘Rule Britannia’.

  A note survives on Thomas Main, written by his captain, Henry Bayntun, dated December 1st 1805, Plymouth:

  I am sorry to inform you, that the above-mentioned fine fellow died since writing the above, At Gibraltar Hospital, of a fever he caught, when the stump of his arm was nearly well. H.B.

  In an area of sea about one and a half miles long and half a mile wide, a series of individual ship-actions developed in which the brutal facts were laid out: if one ship in the encounter could kill more of the people on the other, the victory went to them. The ships of each fleet manoeuvred into contact with their enemy. Each attempted to find those positions ahead or astern from which they could inflict ultimate damage and have none or little done to them in return. It was like a wrestling match, close to and sweaty, in which each was looking to turn the other.

  Astern of Collingwood, the Belleisle found herself embroiled with crowds of French and Spanish ships coming on to her as the rear of the Combined Fleet sailed up into the battle. The San Juan Nepomuceno, the Fougueux, the French Achille, the Aigle, the San Justo and the San Leandro and the French Neptune all attacked her one after another. Her masts fell in a vast tangle of rigging, sails and spars which blocked her gunports and prevented her from either manoeuvring or firing in her own defence. Only when ships in Collingwood’s column crowded into the same mêlée, was she saved from utter destruction. Of all the British ships, she was the most horrifically damaged. All three masts and bowsprit had been shot away. Her hull was ‘knocked almost to pieces’. The only place they could raise an ensign on board was on the end of pike held aloft. Without her rig above her, the body of the mauled Belleisle rolled like a hog in the swell. But here is a strange and significant fact. No ship in the British fleet should have been more murderously treated and yet, at the end of the battle, out of her crew of 750, only thirty-one of her men were dead and 93 wounded. Here too is one of the governing facts of Trafalgar. The captains and gunners of the Combined Fleet failed in the one essential: killing large numbers of the enemy.

  The Polyphemus came to the Belleisle’s rescue, then the Defiance, the Tonnant and the Swiftsure. The crews of each ship cheered as the others came past and drove into the fighting. The Mars, miscalculating a manoeuvre, suddenly found herself stern on to the Monarca and the Algésiras and then bow-on to the Pluton. Captain Duff had allowed his ship to become caught in the most dangerous geometry which sailing battle could offer. It was then that a ball from the Pluton struck him on the chest, drove upwards, removed his head and left his trunk lying dead on the gangway just forward of the quarter-deck. The same shot scything through flesh, killed two seamen behind him. The men of the Mars gathered the trunk of their dead captain, held it up and gave three cheers ‘to show they were not discouraged by it, and they returned to their guns’. Duff’s first lieutenant, William Hennah, appalled at the death of a man he loved, instantly took over command. The ship then drifted out of the battle, all three of her masts still there but with not a single foot of standing rigging having survived the high-aimed and slashingly destructive fire that had been poured into her and killed and wounded 98 of her crew. If a single sail had been raised, the masts would have collapsed. In the ship’s log, her master Thomas Cook wrote, in words thicker with emotion than most logs allow for, ‘Poop and Quarter Deck almost destitute the carnage was so great.’ Even so, none of the ships of the Combined Fleet attempted to take either the Mars or the Belleisle, one of the failures which measures the gap in morale between the two fleets.

  How do men sustain this behaviour? Certainly, the culture of violence had by 1805 entered very deeply into the thinking of the British naval officer. It is true that in his famous prayer on the morning of Trafalgar, Nelson had prayed for the greatest ‘humanity’ after the action, but humanity could only follow on from annihilation. Goodness depended on the riding and revelling. It is the paradox at the heart of moral war.

  Sir Thomas Troubridge was not at Trafalgar but more strikingly than any other of Nelson’s captains he personifies qualities in the British naval officer of the early 19th century which were so excitedly engaged with violence that they seem to border on the unhinged. Apart from a fit of jealousy and a falling-out towards the end of Nelson’s life, Troubridge was always intimately close to Nelson. Nelson loved him as he loved others like him and did his best to promote him and reward him. They had been boys together on the Seahorse and as Nelson, favoured with better connections in the high echelons of naval command, outstripped him in his career, he ensured that Troubridge kept step. St Vincent singled Troubridge out, as he did Nelson, for the aggressive fighting qualities he recognised in both. Both Nelson and St Vincent admired Troubridge for his extraordinary courage in the 1794 mutiny at Spithead when he had seized ten of the mutineers himself. Nelson made sure that Troubridge, who through sheer bad luck drove his ship aground before the Battle of the Nile, nevertheless received a gold medal as the other captains had. He procured him a baronetcy and persuaded Ferdinand King of Sicily to give him jewels, a pension and boxes of gold coins. For Nelson, Troubridge was ‘My honoured acquaintance of twenty-five years, and the very best sea-officer in His Majesty’s service.’

  In 1799, he was sent by Nelson to blockade the French in the city of Naples and to take the islands in the bay—Procida, Ischia and Capri—from the enemy. His task was ‘to extirpate the rebels’ who had risen against the authority of the Sicilian Majesties, with whom Nelson was then obse
ssed. On Ischia, Troubridge found priests preaching revolt against the Sicilian kings. Sir Thomas summoned a judge and then wrote to Nelson. The judge

  talks of it being necessary to have a bishop to degrade the priests, before he can execute them. I told him to hang them first, and if he did not think the degradation of hanging sufficient I would piss on the d-d jacobins carcass, and recommended him to punish the principal traitors the moment he passed sentence, no mass, no confession, but immediate death, hell was the proper place for them.

  In a separate letter he added, ‘If we could muster a few thousand good soldiers, what a glorious massacre we should have…’ and then apologised that he was unable to send on to Nelson the head of a Jacobin which he had been sent by a Sicilian loyalist but which Troubridge feared he could not forward to Nelson as the weather was too hot and the head would rot on passage.

  Nelson went about the task of executing rebels with equal relish. As he wrote to Captain Edward Foote of the frigate Seahorse ‘the hanging of thirteen Jacobins gave us great pleasure: and the three priests [who had been sent to be degraded in Palermo] I hope return in the Aurora, to dangle on the tree best adapted to their weight of sins.’ Perhaps they were brutalising conditions, but the brutality found ready candidates in these men. Perhaps it was of a piece with the necessarily aggressive constitution of a successful military man. Nelson knew this about himself and knew the man he was. He was not smooth. This was, for him, quite explicitly, a war on terror. As he told Sir John Acton, the Neapolitan prime minister, republicanism ‘is the system of terror, by which terror the French hold all Italy.’ In those circumstances, ‘A fleet of British ships of war are the best negotiators in Europe; they always speak to be understood and generally gain their point.’ His aggression was part of the new ‘unpoliteness’—a word used by Nelson in thanking the Lords of the Admiralty for sending ‘gentlemen to sea instead of dancing with nice white gloves.’ It is a phrase that marks him out as part of the great revolution against politeness which swept Europe at the end of the 18th century. When a certain Mr Hill attempted to blackmail him in 1803, by threatening to publish a true account of what had gone wrong during a desperately unsuccessful raid led by Nelson on the French flotilla outside Boulogne, Nelson responded with almost Shakespearean grandeur: ‘I have not been brought up in the school of fear,’ he wrote, ‘and therefore care not what you do. I defy you and your malice.’