by John Sugden
Looking at those men waiting to go reassured Nelson. At the head of the main party stood Berry who never missed a fight. He had already been made a commander, but scorned to sit idly until a ship became available and chose to remain with Nelson. There was Culverhouse of La Minerve and the irrespressible Noble, for whom the seven or eight wounds he had already received in action were evidently not enough. Lieutenant Peirson, back from assorted diplomatic services in Italy, and as ardent as ever, was close at hand to lead the 69th, and Midshipmen Withers and Williams, both schooled in daring adventures on the riviera, commanded parties of tough-looking men. Around the commodore also stood his elite guard of old Agamemnons, armed to the teeth. Most of them were young men in their twenties – men such as John Sykes, gunner’s mate, Francis Cook, master’s mate, John Thompson, quartermaster’s mate, and William Fearney, coxswain – but they were willing to fall and die in defence of their leader.
The commodore had no business leading the boarders, and his slight, sensitive figure suggested a man more fitted for poetry than hewing a path through burly soldiers and seamen. Miller stepped forward for the honour, but Nelson had never led from the back and had no intention of allowing a broad pendant to change him. He persuaded Miller to remain behind to manage the ship and its reserves, drew his sword, and climbed to the Captain’s anchor cathead, overlooking the ornate stern and quarter galleries of the Spanish ship. As he did so, the main party under Berry swarmed along the bowsprit to drop noisily onto the enemy’s poop and quarterdeck or leap into their mizzen chains. Together the parties would converge ‘through fire and smoke’ upon the Spanish officers and attempt to capture the command centre of the ship.26
Jumping across the chasm where the blue water churned far below the Captain’s cathead, Nelson’s party reached the quarter galleries outside the great Spanish cabin. A soldier of the 69th put his musket butt through the windows and they climbed in. The cabin was empty, but when Nelson reached the doors leading to the quarterdeck he found them locked. Spanish officers on the other side fired pistol shots through the woodwork, but Nelson’s men broke down the doors and cleared away the opposition with a spatter of musketry. Then Nelson and his men charged out on deck.
Berry already commanded the poop, and the Spanish officers had regrouped on the quarterdeck where Nelson now caught them between two fires. In any case, the ship’s commandant, Brigadier (Commodore) Don Thomas Geraldino, was mortally wounded and quickly yielded. The Spanish colours came down (in one account by Nelson’s own hand) before the commodore and Peirson led a force along the larboard gangway to the forecastle where two or three more Spanish officers were stationed. But they were already prisoners, and as word of the capitulation went below, the remaining guns of the San Nicolas finally fell silent. About a score of Spaniards had been cut down in the swift conquest, as well as a few of their assailants, but Nelson had taken a superior vessel.
Miller had lashed the spritsail yard of the Captain to the Spanish mizzen chains to prevent his bridge shifting behind the boarders, and more men were soon necessary. For commanding the other side of the San Nicolas amidships was the three-decked San Josef, flagship of the Spanish rear admiral, with which she was fouled. From the San Josef ’s elevated poop and the admiral’s stern gallery some small-arms fire was directed upon Nelson’s boarders below. The redcoats threw their muskets to their shoulders to reply, but Nelson had a remarkable and almost reckless remedy of his own. The San Josef had slid around to sit beside the San Nicolas, which it dominated in height and power. With hundreds of Spaniards barely battened down on the San Nicolas, Nelson decided to lead his boarders over the main deck of the prize and into the San Josef. He would make a large prize the stepping stone to a yet greater one.
The San Josef was an altogether bigger class of vessel than either the Captain or the San Nicolas, and to one awestruck observer looked ‘large enough to hoist’ the British ship on board like an oared boat. The Captain was a ‘third-rate’ warship of seventy-four guns, but the San Josef was a ‘first-rate’, bigger than any vessel in the British fleet, with 112 guns: thirty thirty-six pounders, thirty-two eighteens, thirty-two twelves and eighteen eights, firing in all the equivalent of some 2,214 English pounds – an advantage of perhaps 35 per cent over the weight of metal fired by the Captain. The gun deck of the San Josef was twenty-four feet longer than the British ship’s, her beam eight feet wider and her tonnage burden 50 per cent greater, while her formidable complement amounted to at least 866 men, probably more. Her efficiency, though, was another matter. Later, four of five of her quarterdeck guns were found unused, with their tampions still plugged into the muzzles.27
Calling to Miller for reinforcements, Nelson quickly assembled another boarding party, and again put himself at its head. Assisted by Berry, he flung himself at the side of the San Josef, secured a foothold on the main chains, the small platforms on the side of the ship to which the shrouds were attached, and hauled himself upwards on to the enemy deck. His men were soon streaming into the Spanish ship, but there was very little resistance and no loss of life. A Spanish officer looked over the rail of the quarterdeck and said they had surrendered. When Nelson got there and ran forward, sword in hand, the ship’s commandant advanced only to drop on one knee and surrender his own. The admiral, he said, was dying. He had lost both legs in the first few minutes of battle and would die that night. Astonished, Nelson asked the officer ‘on his honour’ if he had indeed surrendered, and was answered in the affirmative. He then shook the miserable commander’s hand and ordered him to assemble his officers on the quarterdeck and communicate the capitulation to the crew.28
The battle was now assuming an almost surreal quality, with a tour de force of successive giant-killing. As the swords of the officers were collected chirpily under the arm of that old Agamemnon William Fearney, other loyal followers gathered enthusiastically around the remarkable hero. One, Francis Cook, rushed forward in ecstasy and shook Nelson by the hand. Begging the commodore’s pardon, said the excited tar, he wished to congratulate him on the capture of a Spanish first-rate man-of-war.
It was apparently a little before four o’clock. The colours of the San Josef were pulled down, the Prince George was hailed from the deck of the Captain and told to stop firing, and the triumphant ascent of the British flags proclaimed the surrender of both ships. Nelson put one hundred and fifty men aboard his prizes, half under Berry in the San Josef and the rest with Spicer in the San Nicolas. There were some fifteen hundred prisoners to secure or assist, dozens of them wounded, and Spicer found some fires below the decks of the San Nicolas to extinguish, though whether the result of British or Spanish action he could not tell. As Nelson’s men went below they found they had turned the prizes into slaughter pens. According to one eyewitness they were ‘full of dead bodies, some with their heads off, and others both their legs and arms off, and the rest knocked all to pieces, and their entrails all about, and blood running so thick we could not walk the decks in parts without going over our shoes in human blood, which was a deplorable sight and too shocking to relate’.29
The action had not finished, but the defining scenes of the battle of Cape St Vincent had passed. Sir Gilbert Elliot, who watched it all from the frigates, was astounded by what he saw. He congratulated Nelson upon being ‘foremost in such a day’, and wrote to his wife that Jervis was ‘immortalised’ and ‘Nelson a hero beyond Homer’s or any other possible inventions. It is impossible to give you a notion of his exploits in a breath . . .’30
5
Ahead of where the Captain was entangled with its prizes the great Santissima Trinidad was successively or simultaneously engaged by one ship or another. Nelson fancied that he had had ‘more action with her than any ship in our fleet’, but the Excellent, Egmont, Blenheim, Namur and Orion had all gone for a piece of the giant flagship. At times she was like a hulking Cape buffalo ringed and torn by lions, desperately lunging away from agile and inflamed adversaries or swinging defiant horns. But her powers were
waning. Her topmasts were down, and every other mast and spar damaged; the foremast and mizzen were shattered, and her mainmast, hit some twenty times, hung perilously in place only with the assistance of frayed stays and shrouds. Every sail but the foresail had been torn away, and so little of the rigging and halyards remained that manoeuvres and signals became almost impossible. The ship sagged miserably in the water, listing to leeward with water penetrating two hundred shot holes in her body, and all pumps bar one disabled. For some minutes it looked as if she might capsize. Only six to eight guns were reported serviceable, and more than two hundred of her men lay dead or wounded.31
She surrendered, showing a white flag and then the English colours above the Spanish, but a remarkable piece of fortune saved the pride of the enemy fleet. Part of Moreno’s division had at last got to windward and bore down to fire on the Britannia. With the Captain and Colossus out of action and four prizes to protect, at about five-fifteen Jervis signalled his ships to discontinue the action and concentrate, ignorant of the Spanish flagship’s surrender. Remarkably, the British captains on the spot withdrew from the defeated monster. James Saumarez of the Orion may have been particularly culpable. He actually saw the Spanish ship strike its colours, but obeyed Jervis’s signal without taking possession. Aboard the Blenheim it was thought that the enemy flagship raised her colours again when Moreno’s counterattack was seen, but Nelson felt that enormous sacrifices had been squandered too readily, and believed the capture of both the Santissima Trinidad and the Soberano ‘only wanted some good fellow to get alongside them’. Even Jervis, who remained tight-lipped in public, appears to have regretted the want of initiative that allowed the flagship to escape.32
However, Nelson’s own cup was already overflowing. He had been lucky, especially in those dramatic boarding actions. Both the commodore’s prizes had suffered heavily in the preceding bombardment, but they still had more than a thousand fit men between them when the battle ended. More than three hundred were found killed and wounded. The casualties on the San Nicolas appear to have been particularly high, perhaps as many as two hundred and forty, but the San Josef surrendered with less than a hundred of its large crew down. The speed and impetuosity of Nelson’s attack, which enabled him to seize strategic points on the enemy ships before they could be reinforced from below, also contributed to his success. Nevertheless, it had been a huge gamble. It was little surprising that Collingwood was beginning to think his friend guided by ‘a most angelic spirit’ that made him ‘equal to all circumstances’.33
The British fleet had unquestionably distinguished itself. ‘We dashed at them like Griffins spouting fire,’ wrote Collingwood. But the greatest honours have to be shared between Jervis and Nelson. Despite the odds, Jervis believed in his team, and committed it to a major battle. To some extent he had also divided his enemy, although both the windward and leeward divisions of the Spanish fleet continued to command the attention of British ships. However, if the engagement off Cape St Vincent was memorable, it was Nelson who made it so. Without him one or two ships of the line might have been captured, and the action, gallant as it was, would have been forgotten. By contrast, those who watched the Captain wear out of the British line, take on five or six superior ships in protracted gun duels, and finish by boarding one enemy over another, knew they had witnessed a unique naval spectacle. As a combination of insight, decision and heroism it was unsurpassed in the history of combat at sea.34
Nelson’s seizure of the two Spanish prizes was seen from the Victory, and Jervis recognised the Captain’s achievement as much as any man. After the guns ceased, and the British ships formed to protect their prizes, the Victory passed the mangled Captain and gave her three cheers. Every ship in the fleet followed suit. Horatio Nelson had searched for that applause all his life.35
Unable to use his wrecked seventy-four, Nelson got into a boat from La Minerve and transferred to his old frigate, receiving the cheers of her company as he came over the side, cheers so loud that they were heard aboard the other frigates. He stayed to see his pendant run up, and at about four-thirty left for the Victory without troubling to change his uniform. The commander-in-chief met him on the quarterdeck. Still suffering from his wound, Nelson was ‘dirtied and disfigured’ and a ‘great part of his hat [had been] shot away’. But the admiral embraced him, and instantly gave him leave to hoist his pendant on the Irresistible, an undamaged seventy-four captained by George Martin. There was still a possibility of further action, and Nelson was aboard his new ship with Lieutenant Noble by five-fifteen.36
Jervis reacted exactly as Nelson expected. An unverified story that may be true tells how Robert Calder, the commander-in-chief’s flag captain, complained to Sir John that Nelson’s manoeuvre had been a breach of orders. ‘It certainly was so,’ replied the crusty old veteran, ‘and if ever you commit such a breach of orders, I will forgive you also.’37
6
There was no more fighting. The Spanish fleet ran for a port with the consolation that, while their men-of-war had taken a thrashing, at least their mercury convoy had escaped. Jervis withdrew to Lagos for repairs and supplies.
The close of conflict had left the Captain laying on the water like an exhausted and bloodied whale, with La Minerve taking her in tow. The intensity of her struggle can be measured in the munitions she consumed in those brief four hours. One hundred and forty-six barrels, containing between six and seven tons of powder, had been expended. The Captain fired 2,531 round shot, 232 anti-personnel grape and case shot, and 151 double-headed hammered shot designed to tear down rigging. Twenty hand grenades had been thrown to clear enemy decks before boarding, and 1,940 musket and pistol balls fired.38
Nelson’s ship lost eighty killed and wounded, more than a quarter of the three hundred reported for the British fleet as a whole. Among the dead were Midshipman James Francis Goddench, a Portsmouth lad, and two old Agamemnons, William Hayward and Midshipman Thomas Lund, who died of his wounds eight days after the battle. Amidst the exultation there was grief for lost comrades and a deepened sense of the fragility and value of life. ‘I often . . . think how uncertain a man’s life is,’ reflected Oliver Davis, whose right arm was broken on the Captain. ‘I compare it to a flower in the field; in the morning growing and in its full bloom, but before night is cut down and never more seen.’39
Nelson’s own wound was more than trivial, though the initial swelling of his stomach receded within ten days. The blow appears to have produced an abdominal hernia that gave him occasional pain thereafter. Sometimes coughing temporarily forced part of his intestines into the hernial cavity, causing painful inflammation as big as a fist and difficulty in passing water. Three days after the battle Nelson was too ill to attend the court martial of Benjamin Hallowell, who was acquitted of losing his ship in the winter gales. He included the injury on the official return, remembering how a failure to report a damaged eye in Corsica had eventually rebounded upon him, but he still dismissed his fresh misfortune with a ‘they who play at bowls must expect rubbers’ and declined to tell Fanny. She learned of it from the casualty list printed in the London Gazette, and had to wait until Culverhouse and others returned home from the fleet to get a reassuring account of the wound. More than four years later the Patriotic Fund voted Nelson £500 in compensation for his injury.40
The Spaniards lost four ships with 378 carriage guns at the battle of Cape St Vincent, and suffered damage to many others. On board the prizes there were some two hundred and eighty dead and two thousand four hundred prisoners. It was not, admittedly, a huge victory though it was a spectacular and timely one. Cordoba’s fleet was still more or less intact, but any participation in France’s plans for invading England was indefinitely postponed. The most significant impact of Sir John’s battle was on morale. The Spanish navy was damaged in spirit, struck by the humiliation of a significantly superior fleet, and sure as never before that it could not compete with the British in battle. The gloomy defeatism that dogged continental navies was vi
ndicated. Conversely, in the British fleet confidence soared, and captains talked ever more of their ship-for-ship advantages and the possibilities that lay in close-quarter action. As Nelson remarked, ‘If our ships are but carried close by the officers, I will answer for a British fleet being always successful.’41
At home the news fell upon an anxious public downcast by the poor state of the war and a faltering economy. The government needed a success and reacted with a shower of rewards. Obviously Nelson would be a recipient. The fleet was ringing with quips about a new method of boarding called ‘Nelson’s Patent Bridge for Boarding First Rates’. His promotion to rear admiral had long been imminent, and now there were rumours that he would be made a baronet as well.
Ordinarily he would have pounced on such honours, but they could never be divorced from economic circumstances. Mindful of his modest fortune, Nelson remembered that even as a captain he had been embarrassed among the Norfolk gentry. A flag and hereditary title, even the meanest, would multiply those discomforts. He would be expected to mix in circles far more affluent than his own, circles dominated by inherited wealth, and to reciprocate hospitality. He would need to meet the accepted standards of a new class, yet his material ambitions had never been extreme, and the proceeds of his prize money were disappointing. His mind was set on a Norfolk cottage. Much as he hungered for status, he was at heart rather a simple man, and did not feel ready to stand among the aristocracy.
The day after the battle Nelson visited the frigate Lively and spoke to Colonel Drinkwater, who was accompanying Elliot to England. Nelson stated a preference for the Bath, a privileged order of knight-hood with a star and scarlet ribbon, and Drinkwater got the idea that he wanted some visible honour that could be worn and, of course, seen. ‘The attainment of public honours’ and a desire ‘to be distinguished above his fellows were his master passions,’ recalled the colonel. The next day Nelson wrote to Elliot, requesting him to use what influence he had in that direction when he reached London. Nelson was less interested in status per se, which commonly rested upon inheritance, financial double-dealing or political sycophancy, than in a desire to be known as a self-made man raised by valour and a dedication to public duty. To him medals and ribands were no trivial baubles, but badges of bravery, earned distinctions unavailable to mere men of birth.42