by John Sugden
Fog as well as night shrouded La Minerve as an easterly wind, known as a levanter, took her into large Atlantic swells. Then suddenly, in the early hours of the 12th, large shapes loomed like spectres in the murk about them. Two were fairly close, one on either flank. The British had sailed into a squadron of ships, perhaps even a fleet, but which fleet? As Cockburn and Nelson strained eyes and ears, they realised that the signals were unfamiliar. Mysterious flashes stabbed through the darkness, muffled guns boomed dolefully in the fog, and voices were heard – Spanish voices. Nelson had actually sailed into the main Spanish battle fleet. Lumbered with a valuable convoy for Cadiz, it had been pushed west by the levanter, and was now fighting its way back to the coast. However, at the time nothing seemed certain, and Commodore Nelson speculated that he might have blundered into a detached squadron or a convoy bound for the West Indies. For a while the British frigate could only slip anxiously along, making no sudden moves but gently extricating herself from the ships around her as anonymously as possible. Nelson went to see if Elliot was awake, but the ex-viceroy was sleeping soundly in his cot, worn out by the earlier adventure. Nelson let him alone. In the morning, when Sir Gilbert made his appearance, the Spaniards had gone and the adventure had passed him by as if it had been an illusion.
On the morning of 13 February, Nelson found a very different fleet. It was sheltering under the lee of Cape St Vincent, the Portuguese peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic, and strategically placed between Lisbon and the Strait of Gibraltar. There were fifteen ships of the line under the command of Sir John Jervis, and they were waiting to intercept the very Spanish men-of-war Nelson had seen in the fog.
The features of the craggy British admiral must have cracked into a smile at the sight of Nelson’s broad pendant flying above the oncoming frigate. You could send that fellow to the other side of the Mediterranean, but if a battle was afoot he would be there.
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Jervis knew about the Spaniards. Four days before he had heard that a large fleet had passed the Rock of Gibraltar, and from subsequent reports learned that it had been driven into the Atlantic. He was riding off Cape St Vincent in search of it, determined to give battle.
His fleet was not in the best shape to fight, for it had suffered severely in Gibraltar during furious winter gales. The Courageux had broken to pieces on the shores of the Barbary Coast with a loss of four hundred and sixty men, and the Zealous was swept onto a reef in Tangier Bay. The poor Gibraltar ran twice upon Cabrita Point in Algeciras Bay, and had to go home for repairs. Retreating to the Tagus, which a treaty between Britain and Portugal made available, Jervis had fared no better. The Bombay Castle was wrecked upon a sandbank, and the Culloden, the wounded Gibraltar and the St George all took the ground. By the time Nelson returned, Jervis had been reinforced by five sail of the line under Rear Admiral Sir William Parker, but could still deploy only fifteen capital ships.
Yet the old commander-in-chief knew how badly his country needed a victory. Since France and Spain had signed the treaty of San Ildefonso the previous year, Britain was facing a combination of the second and third naval powers. The King of Spain, Charles IV, was said to be a fool and easily manipulated by the French, who set great store in invading England and eliminating the most durable of their foes. In December 1796 France had tried forcibly to enter Britain through the back door by sending an expeditionary force to Ireland, but the discontented Catholic peasantry failed to rise in support, and bad weather drove the French from Bantry Bay before they could even land. Nonetheless, French ambitions remained, and Jervis realised that the Spanish fleet probably figured in any new plans to humble Britain. If the Spaniards got to Brest and reinforced the main French fleet, their united force would constitute a serious threat to England’s defences. The fire inside Jervis flickered furiously. Whatever the odds, he would fight the Spaniards and do what damage he could.
He was a man of Nelson’s heart and mind. Jervis knew that ship for ship the British were superior to the Spaniards, and that only a close-range engagement could exploit those advantages to the full. In the admiral’s book ‘nothing’ would be ‘more unfortuante to the success of His Majesty’s arms’ than ‘a distant cannonade’. He wanted something decisive. When Nelson arrived in the fleet, and brought Hardy and Culverhouse to the Victory to report, it must have reinforced the admiral’s determination to fight and his belief in the ability to win. Shortly the Bonne Citoyenne arrived with intelligence that the Spanish fleet was only twenty miles to the southeast, and, deducing that it was making for Cadiz, Jervis got underway to intercept them.2
Leaving Elliot and his suite to transfer to the Lively frigate, Commodore Nelson returned to the Captain and ordered Lieutenant Noble to run his broad pendant to the masthead. The old company rejoiced to see him, and Nelson was pleased to find that it had been kept in good shape by his new flag captain, Ralph Willett Miller, who had assumed command at Gibraltar in December. Indeed, one division of the ship was just completing exercising the great guns as Nelson’s barge came alongside. Her commodore and officers intact, the ship took its place in a fleet alive with expectation. Jervis bade his ships keep close order during the night as they stood to the southeast with a southwesterly breeze from starboard and the darkness and fog thickening about them. Occasionally the distant thud of Spanish signal guns emerged out of the gloom, and a Portuguese frigate came up with word that the enemy was fifteen miles to windward. On the British ships officers hung about their quarterdecks focusing night glasses over the black water.3
The morning of 14 February – St Valentine’s Day – was dark and misty. It found the British several miles southwest of Cape St Vincent, steering sedately south-southeast, close-hauled on the starboard tack. The ships of the line described two compact parallel lines, with the smaller vessels thrown out on the flanks. Hidden in the haze, ahead and to starboard, sailed the Spanish fleet. For some time the easterly levanter had forced it out to sea, but after the wind swung round to the west the admiral, Teniente General (Vice Admiral) Jose de Cordoba y Ramos, had set a course east-southeast for Cadiz. Unwittingly, as the Spaniards pressed through patches of haze towards their destination they converged with the predatory British fleet.
It was five-forty before the British began to see them slipping in and out of the mist several miles ahead. In the van of the British ships, Captain Thomas Troubridge’s Culloden signalled strange sails seven or eight miles to windward, and shortly afterwards they were seen from Nelson’s Captain and the muffled report of two signal guns heard. Before long the Bonne Citoyenne sloop was fading into the mist on a mission of reconnaissance.
Only gradually did the full extent of the enemy fleet appear. At nine the man at the masthead of Jervis’s flagship, the Victory, counted thirty-one sail, twenty of them ships of the line. If true, the Spaniards outnumbered the British, but even that report actually understated the enemy’s capital ships. As reports from La Minerve and Bonne Citoyenne came in the number of enemy ships climbed – eight, twenty, and (at ten-forty-nine in the morning, when the Spanish fleet was becoming clearly visible) twenty-five ships of the line. Moreover, it became clear that they included some very big warships indeed, looming ‘like Beachy Head in a fog’. Their flagship was the world’s only four-decked battleship, the awesome Santissima Trinidad of one hundred and thirty or more guns, and she was supported by no fewer than six three-deckers of 112 guns each, every one of them larger than the most powerful of Jervis’s ships, the hundred-gun Victory. ‘By my soul, they are thumpers!’ called the signal lieutenant of the Barfleur. But for all their apparent power the Spanish ships were in obvious disorder. Crossing ahead of the British line, they had broken into two divisions. The leading but smaller group was to leeward and consisted of two ships of the line and four or more merchantmen, but Cordoba and his main force lagged six or seven miles behind and to windward of the advancing British line. Though their numbers were great they ‘looked a complete forest huddled together’, and some rode two or three abre
ast with their broadsides neutralised. The Spanish commander-in-chief was signalling feverishly to get them into line but ‘they seemed confusion worse confounded’.4
Jervis saw an opportunity and made his most important contribution to the oncoming battle. The Spanish fleet was superior in numbers, and the armed merchantmen in the leeward division made it seem even larger than it really was. Confronted with such a force some admirals might have blanched at combat, but not Jervis. About eleven in the morning signal thirty-one flew from the Victory. The fleet was ordered to form a single line of battle ahead or astern of the flagship as each captain found convenient, and to steer a course south-southwest to intercept the main body of the Spanish fleet some four miles away. They were going to attack. The British ships had already been preparing for battle, clearing partitions and furniture for the gun crews and flinging impedimenta overboard, strewing the sea with casks, supplies and struggling livestock. At eleven-twenty they ran up their colours.
Nelson’s happy moment had come.
The wind was light but there was no sea, and the fifteen British ships of the line were soon in formation, sliding through the lifting haze under topgallants at a speed of some five knots. The Captain’s position was towards the rear of the line, third from the end at number thirteen. Immediately ahead were the ninety-eight-gun Barfleur carrying the flag of Vice Admiral William Waldegrave, and the ninety-gun Namur captained by James Hawkins Whitshed, while astern came the last two ships of the British line, the Diadem sixty-four under the durable Towry and the Excellent seventy-four with Cuthbert Collingwood. But as Nelson fell into his place he most envied the ships at the other end of the line, nearest the enemy. Leading the fleet into the fight were the Culloden seventy-four under the enterprising Troubridge, Captain Frederick’s ninety-gun Blenheim and the ninety-eight-gun Prince George flying the flag of Admiral Parker.5
Jervis was presented with an obvious opportunity to divide the Spanish ships, and steered straight for the gap between the leeward and windward divisions of the enemy fleet. The more they saw, the greater the British grew in confidence. Their adversaries clearly suffered from a gross want of experience and skill. Cordoba’s fleet was thousands of hands short, even after the enlistment of a thousand soldiers, and the proportion of practised seamen aboard was distressingly small. The flagship itself was said to have had fewer than eighty skilled sailors in a complement of nine hundred, with the balance consisting of soldiers, landsmen and short-term levies. Such deficiencies showed. The master of the British Prince George was unable to discern ‘any plan’ in the Spanish movements, ‘nor did it appear . . . there was sufficient skill or discipline to execute any orders their commander might have given’. When firing began the qualitative difference between the two fleets was confirmed. One British observer felt that Jervis’s fire was ‘superior in the proportion of five or six to one’, while Cordoba himself marvelled at ‘the rapidity and accuracy with which the English handle their guns’.6
While the British advanced the Spanish leeward division continued to bear away southeasterly. It was, in fact, more important than Jervis supposed, because it included several plodding merchantmen laden with mercury, an essential ingredient for the fusion of the precious metals Spain shipped from the Americas. Cordoba’s main force to windward was down to twenty ships of the line, but when the British wedge began to push in front of them, he tried to swing them northwesterly onto the larboard tack. Thus his rear division would pass along the starboard side of the British fleet, steering in the opposite direction, and exchange broadsides with it at a range of a thousand yards or less. Though the Spanish commander-in-chief kept the advantage of the wind, his manoeuvre created immense confusion among his unpractised crews. Three of the Spanish ships, the Principe d’Asturias, flying the flag of Teniente General Joaquin Moreno, the Regla and the Oriente, sheered off towards the leeward division, while the remaining seventeen only completed the turn in ragged groups rather than a respectable line of battle.
Nevertheless, it was entirely satisfactory to Commodore Nelson as he hungrily paced the quarterdeck of the Captain towards the rear of the British line. At last the battle was coming his way. Cordoba’s wind-ward division was heading towards him on the opposite tack, even though the further it proceeded the more it veered to the northwest and increased the gun range between the opposing fleets.
But the advantage still lay with Troubridge at the head of the British line. He took the Culloden into the gap between the two Spanish divisions, double-shotting the guns on both his larboard and starboard sides to fire at both. As soon as the signal to engage went up on the Victory, Troubridge opened a disciplined and deadly fire. His starboard guns savaged the Spaniards of the windward division as they passed on their new course, and one by one the other British ships followed suit, spitting fire and shot in succession, their timbers shaking with the thunder, and their decks enveloped in thick black clouds of stinking powder smoke.7
The Spaniards replied, but feebly. One of their officers admitted that it was ‘impossible . . . to persuade any of the crew to go aloft to repair the injured rigging. Threats and punishment were equally ineffectual . . . The panic-struck wretches, when called upon to go aloft, fell immediately on their knees, and in that posture cried out that they preferred being sacrificed on the spot to performing a duty in the execution of which they considered death as inevitable.’ Nevertheless, not every Spanish shot fell harmlessly into the sea. The Colossus was reduced to relative impotence when her foresail and fore topsail yards were shot away and her fore topmast mangled.8
At about noon it was the turn of the Captain, as a large Spanish three-decker approached her on the opposite tack. Nelson’s guns blazed at the enemy ships for forty or fifty minutes until the last of them had passed, giving far more than she received. Yet for him it was an insubstantial repast, and he fumed in dismay as the Spanish ships receded in one direction while the rear of the British fleet proceeded doggedly in the other.
At this point Jervis had kept the Spanish fleet divided, but it remained to be seen if he could turn an advantage into a victory. The crucial stage of the battle of Cape St Vincent was only just beginning to unfold.
At about the time Nelson began firing at the rear of the British line, action was subsiding in the van as the last of the Spanish ships passed the Culloden. It was now necessary for the British ships to turn in pursuit of the Spaniards, but not until 12.08 did Jervis fly signal eighty, ordering his capital ships to tack in succession as they reached the head of the line. Troubridge did so smartly. Anticipating the signal, he was already putting the Culloden about and turning after the retreating Spaniards on the larboard tack as the signal flags ran up on the Victory. In due course the Blenheim, Prince George and Orion followed suit, turning in the wake of the Culloden as they reached the front of the line, but so sprightly did Troubridge swing towards his prey that a gap of half a mile opened between his and the following ship.
Sir John Jervis, commanding from the quarterdeck of the Victory in the centre of the British line, was absorbed by the considerable dangers ahead of him. Cordoba’s windward division had been deflected northwesterly onto the larboard tack, but to the British left there still remained the Spanish leeward division, now reinforced and commanded by Admiral Moreno. There was every chance it would beat back to rejoin the main body under Cordoba, either by weathering the head of the British line or even cutting through it. In fact, within a quarter of an hour of Jervis signalling his ships to tack in succession Moreno did lead a spirited assault on the British centre from leeward, trying to break through in front of the Victory. For several minutes the Spaniards tried to carve a passage through the tightly bunched British ships, facing a ferocious fire from the Colossus, Irresistible, Victory, Egmont and Goliath with terrific courage, but finally they were forced to recoil and bear away to southward under a press of sail.9
Probably Jervis delayed ordering his van to tack after Cordoba until 12.08 because he anticipated the attack from leeward
, or perhaps he was far clearer about what was happening in front of him than behind. The Victory was, after all, blanketed in black powder smoke, spurted to starboard in the firing and blown back across the British line by the westerly wind. According to one of the many unsupported stories spawned by this renowned combat Sir John went up to his poop deck to get a clearer view of the action. While there he was spattered by the blood and brains of a man slain at his side by a round shot, but he grimly wiped the gore from his face before resolutely stumping back to the quarterdeck to resume control of the battle.10
However, that control was beginning to unravel as the heart of the battle moved northwest towards the rear of the British fleet. Coming a few minutes after noon Jervis’s order to his ships to tack at the head of the line did not give them sufficient time to turn, chase and engage the flying Spaniards of the windward division. The rear of the British line was to starboard of Cordoba’s flying ships, but its ships were under orders to continue southwest in an orderly queue, away from the Spaniards, until each reached the turning point and could tack in succession to join the pursuit.
Sir John did not miss the problem and tried to speed matters up. At about twelve-fifty, with his leading ships already in pursuit of the enemy, he repeated the signal to tack in succession for those still waiting to turn, but this time directed the movement to begin with the Britannia under Vice Admiral Sir Charles Thompson, the sixth ship from the rear. A minute later signal forty-one also ran to the flagship’s masthead, instructing the ships to ‘take suitable stations and engage as [you] arrive up in succession’. The commander-in-chief was obviously trying to do two things: he was creating a new turning point closer to the rear of his line to get it into action more rapidly, and he was granting ships that had tacked and caught up with the enemy the freedom to choose the best positions to engage.11