by Sam Willis
Naval victories were, if you like, starbursts in a war of attrition that enabled the war to be won. It is no coincidence that the eight naval victories in this book were followed by Wellington’s 15 land victories, without a defeat, in Spain. The undeniable public attraction of those naval starbursts, meanwhile, generated its own influence on events. Everyone in Britain loved naval victory; they could never get enough of it. Every naval victory was appreciated by the public because it made both them as individuals and the nation feel more secure. The Navy kept them safe; the Navy kept them free; the Navy kept them British. The victories were also understood in terms of wealth; naval victories secured trade and trade generated money. Naval victory therefore generated public support for the navy and public support translated into political support. Money was found and infrastructure improved and ships were built. The relationship was symbiotic. Go and visit the great surviving naval dockyards at Plymouth or Chatham and you will be amazed by the facilities constructed: the rope walks, the dry docks, the victualling yards. Yes, these facilities were the foundation of British naval victory but they were also created because of British naval victory.
The relationship between the Navy and the public is central to the influence of naval victory upon history. As you sit and read the Admirals’ letters, imagine yourself as a direct descendant of a member of the public sitting and reading the published versions of these letters in 1794 or 1805, when everything was fresh and raw and a general and detailed perception of the battle was still elusive. What actually happened in the battle was far less important than what the dispatch described. The dispatch had already acquired an agency of its own.
That said, one of the most significant characteristics of these dispatches is their inaccuracy, an inaccuracy sometimes wilfully achieved. More often than not the fog of war has insufficiently cleared for numbers of captured ships or casualties to be accurate, but occasionally one’s gaze is deliberately drawn in certain directions. Collingwood’s Trafalgar dispatch is a masterpiece of such manipulation, giving as it does the false impression of absolute cohesion. In some respects, therefore, to search for the ‘truth’ behind the casualty figures or to plot with utmost care the track of a particular ship is rather to miss the point of naval battle and the dispatches that describe it. Naval battle was infinitely intricate, governed by the relationship between unpredictable bursts of wind and miles upon miles of rigging, and manipulated by thousands of men, each with their own motivation, desires and fears. But the story of naval battle was a blunt, unsubtle, instrument of propaganda. It did not necessarily matter if a dispatch was inaccurate; indeed, these dispatches support the argument that it is impossible to fight a war and tell the truth at the same time. The detail was always far less important than the overall message of absolute and repeated British victory.
The Uncertain
An inevitable casualty of such a broad message is any sense of doubt in the narrative we read, for here are seven battles and here are seven overwhelming British victories. One can be easily forgiven for presuming that, after the first one or two, the result was somehow viewed as inevitable; that in some way these battles were won even before they were fought. There is, of course, some value in this approach because it encourages us to appreciate the roles of the bureaucrats and administrators, the manufacturers and suppliers who rode the tides of paperwork to ensure that the ships were repaired, manned and victualled and the men fed, clothed and healthy. It was these individuals and organisations that laid the foundation for British naval victory.
Yet the dispatches themselves often highlight precisely what was uncertain, what was not inevitably to lead to naval victory. They emphasise the unpredictable role of wind, weather and damage; they remind us of the occasions when random events tipped the battle one way or another; above all, they remind us of the presence of an enemy intent on preventing the British from having their own way. The letters are clearly written by men who have fought a fierce and prolonged duel against a proud enemy. One can sense the adrenaline coursing through their bodies as they composed the letters; one can appreciate their relief at being alive and their delight at being victors. All of this helps to freshen our perspective of the battles by highlighting the choices that were available to the participants, the uncertain paths, the tumbling circumstance that guided the results.
How, therefore, can we reconcile this perspective of unpredictability and uncertainty with our understanding of how these victories were won? This is where the detail of battle has its value because the deeper one digs, the more uncertain the picture becomes. When we talk of gunnery, do we mean long distance or point blank? Is the enemy to windward or to leeward? How did developments in chemistry alter the potency of the gunpowder for each fleet? How did changes in gunnery equipment impact on gunnery efficiency? When we talk of seamanship, are we talking about repairing ships in action or the ability to maintain cohesion in fog? Are we talking about the ability to manoeuvre a ship with a disabled foremast, or the ability to engage from the lee position? In terms of leadership, are we talking about admirals commanding captains across vast expanses of ocean, about petty officers commanding sailors in the darkness of the gun decks or even about the leadership of seamen with no official rank but who nonetheless acted as natural leaders?
Each battle must be considered in its own right, each individual duel within each battle, even each ship on its own. Every ship was after all manned to varying degrees of completeness. For example, while a ship could be numerically well-manned, a large portion of her men could be soldiers or inexperienced landsmen rather than trained sailors. A portion of her crew might be suffering from a debilitating illness, be it typhus or scurvy. Nonetheless, even if we bear in mind that exceptions to every one of these following statements can be found in the seven battles in this book, it is generally the case that British gunners could fire with more accuracy and for longer than their enemies; that British hulls could better withstand a broadside than their enemies’; that British sailors could better cope with the carnage surrounding them; and that British sailors could repair their ships with greater efficiency both during and after battle. Most importantly of all, it seems that British sailors themselves knew all of this. They had come to recognise it in the previous war, the War of American Independence, and they had had their suspicions confirmed in 1794 in the first of these actions, The Glorious First of June. Simply put, British sailors knew that, if they could engage their enemy close enough and for long enough, the enemy’s guns would, eventually, fall silent.
And yet all of this was soon to change. Seapower certainly changed the nature and direction of the Napoleonic wars but the Napoleonic wars also changed the nature of seapower.
The Change
Napoleon’s war against Britain continued after 1806 and he began new wars: against Portugal in 1807, Spain in 1808 and Russia in 1812. In that period the Royal Navy continued to fight the French, but it also fought the Danish, Russian and Ottoman navies. Lest we forget, Britain also went to war with America between 1812 and 1815. None of those conflicts, however, produced another fleet battle on the scale of those fought between 1794 and 1806. Too many people had tried to play with fire and been burned. No one was willing to spend the money on constructing a fleet and then, of all things, risk it in pitched battle with the British. Before very long, however, the coming of steam propulsion changed everything all over again, consigning the entire age of sailing warfare, rather than just the story of British dominance, to the past.
Steam-powered ships became bigger and armoured and their guns fired explosive shells unimaginable distances. Changes in technology also began to affect the way that military campaigns were reported. In 1850 the first under-sea telegraph cable was laid between Dover and Calais, allowing news to be passed rapidly to and from the continent. Five years later a cable linked Sweden, Denmark and Germany, and three years after that another was laid across the Atlantic. The ease with which a fleet’s activities could be reported over great distances wa
s therefore changing although, surprisingly, we are still uncertain of the identity of the first naval battle reported by telegraph. It is likely to have been one of the naval battles of the Crimean War (1853–6), depending on the capability of the Russian telegraph system in different locations. We are on firmer footing with radio. Thomas Edison filed a patent as early as 1885 which described the ‘Means for transmitting signals electrically’, and the first battle between fleets to make significant use of wireless was fought 20 years later, when the Japanese destroyed the Russian battle fleet at Tsushima in 1905.
The last letters in this collection, therefore, mark neither the end of sailing warfare nor the end of the era of handwritten dispatches. However, they do mark the last significant fleet battle between British and French fleets in a war that had, by then, lasted 13 years and which was part of a longer tradition of naval warfare between the two countries that can be traced back over a century through the War of American Independence (1775–82), the Seven Years War (1755–62), the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) to the Nine Years War of 1688 to 1697. Moreover, none of the fleet battles that followed San Domingo in 1806, and very few that preceded The First of June in 1794, stands comparison with any of those fought between 1794 and 1806. It was an intense sliver of history, a period of unmatched ferocity at sea, a period that characterised and shaped the history of the world and a period populated by men whose achievements and sacrifices deserve the widest possible recognition.
POSTCRIPT
The Photograph
The volume of dispatches, with its definitive beginning and end, encourages us to perceive an era that is both self-contained and dislocated from the present day or, indeed, from other periods of history. If we are ever going to value fully this collection and the achievements it describes, however, we must learn to recognise and appreciate the links between past eras as well as the strands of history that connect us directly to the past.
Last year, on a trip to Brighton, I visited one of my favourite shops, The Lanes Armoury. Crammed with arms and armour of every possible description, it is one of the finest sources of antique militaria in Europe. There, in a display case, hidden among the samurai swords, cutlasses and flintlocks, was a battered picture frame about the size of a hardback book. I glanced at the framed objects: a gilt medal below a faded photograph of an elderly man peering mistrustfully out of the picture. He was wearing a dark-coloured mid-Victorian jacket decorated with two medals. His right hand rested on a walking stick and his left hand made a curious gesture beneath his medals, as if to underline them (p. 339).
The picture was clearly taken in the early years of photography, a science that was not widespread until the 1850s. One of the earliest conflicts to be captured by photographers was the Crimean War of 1853–6 but this man was clearly too old to have been active then. A little puzzled I looked more carefully at the medal and saw, to my astonishment, that it was decorated with a fleet of sailing warships. Quite extraordinary. This was, unmistakably, Alexander Davison’s Nile Medal (fig. 13), issued to commemorate Nelson’s great victory at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, the fourth of the great battles described in this book.
At that time no official medal system existed but, in a magnificent and philanthropic gesture, Davison, Nelson’s chosen Prize Agent, had this medal designed, struck and issued to every participant, in gold to Nelson and his captains, in silver to lieutenants and warrant officers, in gilt metal to petty officers and in copper to seamen and marines. The lack of an official rewards system was not remedied until 1847 when Queen Victoria introduced the Naval General Service Medal. It is likely, therefore, that the two medals shown in the photograph are Davison’s medal alongside the Naval General Service Medal.
No information about the man or his medal survives, though it is clearly made of gilt, so we can assume that he was a petty officer.2 The photograph was probably taken in the mid-1850s at the earliest, and he was perhaps 20 or so when serving as a petty officer. He is likely, therefore, to have been in his early 80s when the photograph was taken, just one of a generation of men who had fought in the great age of sail but who went on to experience the extraordinary technological and social changes of the 19th century. HMS Victory’s last Trafalgar veteran actually died in 1876, aged 92, but the last known survivor of the Battle of Trafalgar, a Spaniard named Pedro Martínez who had been a cabin boy on the 74-gun San Juan, died in Dallas, Texas in 1898, aged 109, some 40 years after this photograph was taken.
Let’s now fit my great-grandfather into the mix. He was ‘launched’ in 1894, fought at Jutland in 1916, enjoyed a lengthy and varied career in the navy and was finally ‘broken’ up in 1982. However briefly, therefore, the life of my great-grandfather, who knew both 20th-century World Wars, overlapped the life of at least one veteran of Trafalgar. Now his son, my grandfather, is very much alive. Derek Willis, a naval veteran of World War II, the nuclear tests on Christmas Island in 1956 and the Cod War, is full of stories of his father and of his father’s time.
My experience is by no means exceptional. The strands of history run through us all. Perhaps you are related to Walter Hewen, one of the cold and tired sailors who lost his bedding, a shirt, a pair of trousers and a black silk handkerchief in the storm of war at Camperdown (p. 149); to William Kelson, a drummer who was wounded by flying splinters in ‘cheek and eyeball’ (p. 143); or to one of the four women and one girl mustered aboard the Hercules in the same battle (p. 353)? Or are you related to Rear Admiral Alexander Cochrane’s cook who died at San Domingo in 1806? Perhaps you are even related to one of the admirals: to Howe, Hood, Duncan, Jervis, Nelson, Hyde Parker, Collingwood or Duckworth.
Every time that we uncover a link we are drawn closer to the past, and every time we are drawn closer to the past we are encouraged to think about it anew. That is the real value of these dispatches, the real reason that they should not lie forgotten. The past is not an alien time and place, a disconnected world to be studied with scientific objectivity. It is our past inhabited by our relatives. They are simply waiting to be found and hoping to be understood.
The Appeal
These letters describe a period central to the creation of the British Empire and of British identity and a flashpoint in the history of the world. To view those battles through the original sources is to peer over the shoulders of the Lords of the Admiralty and the King as they learned the fate of nations and the future of their world. It is a profoundly powerful experience and, as was always intended by the Lords of the Admiralty, both in 1821 when the documents were first collated, and in 1859 when they were bound together, it is one that can and must be shared as widely as possible. This collection of dispatches is a cornerstone of British history and culture and should have its place on display in the ‘Treasures of the British Library’ permanent exhibition, alongside documents as various as the Lindisfarne Gospels, Magna Carta and John Lennon’s scribbled lyrics.
It is important, though, to point out that the current inaccessibility of the dispatches does not result from a nation turning its back on its maritime past. Although one should never be satisfied, numerous projects of great worth have been conducted around the country in recent years. My personal favourite was Bill Fontana’s remarkable sound sculpture Wave Memories, which transmitted a live feed of the sound of the sea off Cape Trafalgar through the public address system in Trafalgar Square, creating a direct link between the location of the battle and its cultural monument. It was quite fantastic: how inappropriate for the ordered space of Trafalgar Square to be interrupted by the real Trafalgar! I am now particularly fond of the efforts being made by National Historic Ships,18 a public body devoted to preserving British historic vessels. Nonetheless, we have failed when it comes to these dispatches.
It seems appropriate to end with the words of Lord Nelson himself. He would have been horrified, though not perhaps surprised, to find that the wishes of the Lords of the Admiralty of 1859 have not been met. On 7 Nove
mber 1803 he wrote to one of his captains and close friend, Sir Alexander Ball: ‘It is the custom, and a very bad one, for the English, never to tell their own story.’3 Surely the time has come for us to prove the great man wrong. Let us get the dispatches back where they should be, on permanent display, an antidote to our collective amnesia. We are immensely lucky still to have one of the most significant series of documents of world history in our possession and even more blessed that it survives in magnificent condition. Let us therefore cherish it, display it and advertise it as one of our finest national treasures.
Every reader, from first-time dabblers in naval history to career scholars of the age of sail, will, I hope, discover something new here. My favourite letter is from Collingwood to Vice-Admiral Don Ignatio Maria D’Alava in the aftermath of Trafalgar (p. 289). Alava, injured, has escaped to Cadiz and Collingwood writes courteously to remind him that, actually, he had already surrendered and that he should consider himself a prisoner of war. Unsurprisingly, Alava, who was now happily at home, took a different view. I was particularly surprised that William Bligh, famed for the mutiny on the Bounty, fought at both Camperdown (1797) and Copenhagen (1801) (p. 134 and p. 238) and I was chilled by Rear-Admiral Thomas Pasley’s shaky signature, added to the foot of his dictated narrative of The Glorious First of June (p. 67) when barely able to hold a quill because one of his legs had been blown off only hours before. What, then, is your favourite letter? What did you find most surprising or shocking? Let me know at www.sam-willis.com or on Twitter @navalhistoryguy. Let’s get a debate started. And do, please, signal your support for my petition to have the dispatches made accessible to the public once again.