Trafalgar: “England confides that every man will do his duty”

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Poet's Coroner

Mr. Peperium

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When one is writing about the Royal Navy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it is difficult to avoid understatement; it is difficult to do justice to one’s subject; for so very often the improbable reality outruns fiction.

 …My point is that the admirable men of those times, the Cochranes, Byrons, Falconers, Seymours, Boscawens and the many less famous sailors from whom I have in some degree compounded my characters, are best celebrated in their own splendid actions rather than imaginary contests; that authenticity is a jewel; and that the echo of their words has an abiding value.

--Patrick O’Brian, Author’s Note to Master and Commander

 

You can always beat a Frenchman if you fight him long enough. The difficulty of getting at them is sometimes more fancy than fact…When in doubt, to fight is always to err on the right side.

--Admiral Sir William Cornwallis

 

Although in terms of gun power the British were inferior—2,148 as opposed to 2,568 for the Combined Fleet—in tactical terms they were certainly at an even greater disadvantage, the Franco-Spanish Fleet boasting an additional six ships of the line (which later greatly enhanced the effectiveness of their cross-fire) not to mention the numerically superior (albeit less well trained) manpower—nearly 30,000 strong compared to Nelson’s force of little over 17,000.

--Alan Schom, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle

 

It is as Mr. Pitt knows, annihilation that the Country wants—and not merely a splendid victory of twenty-three to thirty-six—honorable to the parties concerned, but absolutely useless to the extended scale, to bring Buonaparte to his marrow-bones…

--Vice Admiral Lord Nelson

 

The French had once been masters of shipboard artillery, but the Revolution had abolished the privileged stature of naval gunners and their mastery had never been recovered. It now firmly belonged to the British. Colligwood made a habit of telling his gunners that if they could fire three well-directed broadsides in five minutes, no vessel could resist them. Practice had enabled them to do that in three and a half minutes.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

On every deck on every ship in every fleet, gunners, carpenters, topmen, surgeons, marines and soldiers were preparing for the emergencies that might arise, the wounded that would come, the weapons that would be required. Preparation of the magazines and movement of shot and powder to the guns. The laying-out of medical instruments. Decks sanded to prevent slide by the bare feet of the gunners. One of the seamen aboard Santissima Trinidad, obviously a conscript and new to the ship, was to describe his reaction to the preparation for battle that morning. Watching sailors distributing sacks of sand on deck and throughout the lower decks he asked a boy what it was for. ‘“For the blood” he said, very coolly. “For the blood!” I exclaimed, unable to repress a shudder. I looked at the sand—I looked at the men who were busily employed on this task—and for a moment I felt I was a coward.”’

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

Nelson toured Victory to view all of his own ship’s activity, addressing the crew at their stations. There was concern for Nelson’s safety among his officers. The surgeon and his two secretaries…intended to plead with Nelson to remove or at least cover the brilliant decorations he wore, to make him less of a target for French marksmen shooting from high in the rigging. …[S]enior captain of his frigates, Henry Blackwood, when called to Victory for a final conference, went even further and suggested that Nelson move his flag to Blackwood’s frigate, Euryalus, to allow better view of the battle and because of the high value of his life to the country. Nelson considered that a poor example to set.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

At eleven thirty Nelson told his flag lieutenant, John Pasco, to prepare a signal to the fleet. Nelson said, ‘You must be quick, for I have one more to make, which is for “Close Action”. I wish to say, “England confides that every man will do his duty”.’

Pasco had the new and far more efficient system of signals. This code had a vocabulary offering many words that could be transmitted with a single flag bearing a number in the vocabulary book. Other words had to be spelled out letter by letter. Nelson’s demand for haste led Pasco to say, ‘If your lordship will permit me to substitute expects for confides the signal will soon be completed, because the word expects is in the vocabulary, and confides must be spelt.’ Nelson was happy with that. ‘That will do, Pasco, make it directly.’ And Pasco hoisted, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’, greeted by three cheers from every ship.

The action began near simultaneously with the signal…

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

Having reached the enemy line several minutes before Victory did to windward, the usually phlegmatic Collingwood shouted through the din to his captain, ‘Rotheram, what would Nelson give to be here!’…Collingwood immediately found himself in the unenviable situation of being caught up in a heavy enfilade from three directions.

--Alan Schom, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle

 

As Royal Sovereign bore down upon the two ships that led the rear line of the Combined Fleet, the Santa Ana and the Fougeueux, Collingwood told his sailors to lie down at their quarters, to reduce casualties on the approach. Fougueux fired the first shot from the French line, hoisting her colors as she did so. She closed up with the intention of preventing Royal Sovereign from going through the line but at ten minutes past noon Royal Sovereign broke through the enemy line. She came up to Santa Ana and fired into her, a broadside with the guns double-shotted. It was done with such precision that the slaughter was terrible. That single broadside killed or wounded nearly four hundred of the Spanish ship’s crew. Royal Sovereign then ranged alongside Santa Ana, so close that the guns were nearly muzzle to muzzle. As Fougueux came up, yardarm to yardarm, she, too, took a broadside. ‘I thought the Fougueux was shattered to pieces—pulverized,’ her master-at-arms later said. ‘The storm of projectiles that hurled themselves against and through the hull on the port side made the ship heel to starboard. Most of the sails and rigging on the port side were cut to pieces, while the upper deck was swept clear of the greater number of seamen working there.

 --Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

A man should witness a battle in a three-decker from the middle deck, for…it bewilders the senses of sight and hearing. There was the fire from above, the fire from below…the guns recoiling with violence, reports louder than thunder, the decks heaving and the sides straining. I fancied myself in the infernal regions, where every man appeared a devil.

--Second-Lieutenant Rotely, Royal Marines

 

Nelson all along had wished to make for the French flagship. The wind had died to a ‘mere breath’. But the British did at least have such wind as there was in their favor. Victory was driven onward by riding the swell. She continued to take heavy fire from three ships, Bucentaure, Santissima Trinidad and Redoutable. As she drew near to Bucentaure, Nelson’s wish and intention were to break through the line astern of the flagship and then to ‘run on board’, meaning to pass through the line and come up alongside the flagship on the other side. But Hardy declared that to be impracticable because of a tight cluster of ships beyond. They could pass close under Bucentaure’s stern, Hardy said, but they could not pass through the line without running on board one of the other ships lying close to Bucantaure. Nelson replied, ‘It does not signify which we run on board of. Go on board which you please: take your choice.’ So Victory, her sails riddled or shredded, passed within thirty feet astern Bucentaure. And as Victory did so a carronade on her forecastle fired one round shot and a keg filled with five hundred musket balls right into the stern cabin windows of Bucentaure. Then, as she drew ahead, the full fifty guns of her broadside, double- and even triple-shotted with balls, blasted upon the French flagship.

The barely two minutes of that entire action left Bucentaure in a practically defenseless state. The destruction within the ship was severe, judging by the dense smoke that poured from her, filling Victory’s own interior, threatening to suffocate her crew, and covering those on the quarterdeck with dust from the shattered woodwork of Bucentaure’s stern. Aboard Bucentaure nearly four hundred lay dead or wounded. This was at one p.m.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

If anyone will picture to himself the destructive effects to be expected from a mass of iron, whose total weight sometimes exceeds 3000 lbs., driven through space with a velocity double that of sound, travelling 1600 feet a second, and suddenly arrested in its course by a penetrable substance which tears and flies into splinters more fatally than the shot itself, he will understand the formidable power of a line-of-battle ship’s first broadside. Instead of frittering away this irresistible force as we used to do then, in the hope of cutting some ropes…or for the mere chance of destroying some important rigging or wounding a mast, the English better taught, concentrated it upon a more certain object, the enemy’s batteries. They heaped our decks with slain while our shot passed over their ships.

--Julien de la Graviere

 

Admiral Lord Nelson had had his ‘pell-mell battle’—as, ironically, both he and Villeneuve had referred to it quite independently—and indeed his war of annihilation, resulting in the greatest British naval victory in history. The French and Spanish, though fighting with undaunted bravery and tenacity, suffered a shattering defeat, destroying French naval morale for decades to come. ‘So much courage and devotion’, Villeneuve afterwards lamented, ‘deserved a better fate.’

--Alan Schom, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle

[As the smoke cleared away, the storm heralded by the day’s heavy swell finally broke. Battle-shattered Royal Navy vessels struggled to evacuate as many men as possible from foundering French and Spanish ships.]

Haste produced hard decision. A seaman from revenge recounted one painful scene:

A father and son came down the ship’s side to get on board one of our boats. The father had seated himself, but the men in the boat, thinking from the load and the boisterous weather that all their lives would be in peril, could not think of taking the boy. As the boat put off the lad sprang from the ship into the sea and caught hold of the gunwale of the boat, but his attempt was resisted, as it risked al their lives; and some of the men resorted to their cutlasses to cut his fingers off in order to disentangle the boat from his grasp. At the same time the feelings of the father were so worked upon that he was about to leap overboard and perish with his son. Britons could face an enemy but could not witness such a scene of self-devotion: as it were a simultaneous thought burst forth from the crew, which said, ‘Let us save both father and son or die in the attempt.’

The pair were eventually landed at Gibraltar and exchanged with other prisoners. Another British rescue was the ship’s cat, which ran out on the muzzle of one of the lower-deck guns and was plucked off by a British seaman.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

[Lest anyone suspect the above is merely sentimental, Mostert goes to great lengths to establish the substance behind the heroic, generous image of the British seaman.]

Beyond the tone of evangelical urgency…the portrait of the late-eighteenth-century British sailor that emerges is a fine one of an individual bound by his own distinctive values. Those, formed by the worst and the best in his seagoing life, raised him to his own special niche. One can see him, as a hardy, easy-going type, simple in manner and outlook, equipped with a buoyant spirit that determined his survival. All of that is true enough. Being mostly illiterate, he left few individual accounts of what drove him and his fellows, but there is plenty available from the sources that surrounded him. From all of it we can see that the worst of what he endured yielded much of the best in him.

 --Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

 

All the men in our ship [the Victory] who have seen him [Nelson] are such soft toads they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed.

--British Seaman

 

Napoleon was, without a doubt, one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, but he was also one of the greatest liars, exceeded only by Stalin and Hitler. On the morning of 7^th December, the semi-official government newspaper, Journal de Paris, informed the French people that a great naval battle had taken place off Trafalgar on 19^th (not the 21^st) October, a stupendous battle in which thirty-three British ships, it said, faced the Combined Fleet, including fifteen British ships that were not in fact present that day and another three which did not even exist. The Franco-Spanish Fleet, it continued, had won a spectacular victory resulting in nineteen British ships either having been sunk, burned, wrecked on the rocks or so mauled by gunfire as to be rendered useless…’This report attests brilliantly to the worth of the French Fleet,’ the Parisian paper concluded, though failing to explain why twenty-three battleships of the Combined fleet had suddenly disappeared, and why the French Government refused to celebrate such a splendid victory.

 --Alan Schom, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle

 

Pitt had the news at three a.m. [November 6^th]. A colleague later described the Prime Minister’s reaction. ‘He observed that he had been called upon at various hours in his eventful life by the arrival of news of various hues; but whether good or bad, he could always lay his head on his pillow and sink into sound sleep again. On this occasion, however, the great event announced brought with it so much to weep over as well as to rejoice at, that he could not calm his thoughts; but at length got up, though it was three in the morning.’

Three days later Pitt attended the Lord Mayor’s Day at Guildhall, where the Lord Mayor proposed his health as ‘the Saviour of Europe’. Pitt rose and said, ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me; but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her own exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.’ He sat down.

‘That was all; he was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect,’ said Arthur Wellesley, who was present.

--Noel Mostert, The Line Upon a Wind

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Comments

[Robbo]

Well done, Mr. P.

I started in on Line Upon A Wind but put it down because there was something about the writing style that irritated me. This was about two years ago and I can't remember what the problem was, and I'd also been on a bit of a nautical bender so was perhaps a bit, ah, water-logged, so perhaps I'll have to pick it up again.

[Mr. P]

Same here. I liked the book very much but the style--or rather, lack of style--irritated me no end. I wanted to know the period better, however, so I persevered. Then I penned this review for Amazon, which goes into our mutual difficulties a bit deeper:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Somewhat Choppy Crossing, October 6, 2010
By Mr Bennett - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Line Upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815 (Hardcover)

This book deserves all the praise other reviews lavish on it. Starting with the genesis and evolution of naval warfare, before Nelson ever sets foot on his first brig we know why the ship was designed as it was, from the topsail to the keel. Questions that have lurked in the back of the mind for years (who first had the idea of cutting ports for guns below deck? The French, surprisingly) are answered. Yes, as one reviewer has mentioned we swing from the lethargy of expository detail to gripping, dramatic action--much like life must have been for the men aboard those ships. And when I say "lethargy of detail" I'm not complaining. Every detail is worth knowing--they just pass less swiftly than the chases and battles.

My reservations--and the reason why this review lacks a fifth star--stem from the author's style. Odd, even confounding, word choices, the deletion of definite articles where there should be definite articles, thus tripping up the reader many a time and oft, are all part of it. Convoluted sentences when the author, to his credit, strives to articulate sensations and emotions that are largely evanescent are another factor. But overall the fifth star is reserved because of the fluctuating perspective of the narrative.

We start with what could pass for the usual Politically Correct version of the development of Eastern and Western maritime traditions. We are treated to a rather sniffy quote from a prominent Indian historian to the effect that we should not be surprised that the aggressive use of ships for the domination of trade routes would be a Western invention. At this point I'm bracing myself for another 700-odd pages of predictable head shaking and eye-rolling. But once the real story begins, all that is forgotten. Words like "courage", "honor" and "heroism" are used without a blush. Several times the author explores the phenomenon of human courage and comes up with answers that are illuminating. He even goes so far as to admit that we moderns can find the examples of raw courage with which this era abound "intimidating". He's right, we can.

But always there lurked at the back of my mind the first few chapters wherein Western aggression was so dramatically contrasted with Eastern pacifism. Granted, by the time the two fleets are closing off Cape Trafalgar we are a long way from those early pages, but the disconnect remained with me throughout.

Finally, the ending seems enigmatic and unsatisfying. After, as the Walrus said, taking us out so far and making us trot so quick, we should find more at the end of all our travels than a rather pedestrian observation about how the author feels (and presumable we, too, would feel) on a visit to St. Helena. Yes, the brooding presence of the exiled emperor pervades the place and one gets a sense of all the history that passed there. (Wouldn't a more apt description be the history that was reviewed by the man who made it happen?) But the same is true of a visit to Gettysburg or Monticello.

Wouldn't a more apt ending be the observation--especially in a book that set up the dynamic from the start--that the final end of Napoleon, the master of Land, was to be imprisoned by the element that ultimately frustrated all his grand designs, Sea?

Re-reading it now, the only thing I could add is that we also never discover where the poetic, heroic title of the book comes from. A letter? A quote? It is never revealed.

[Robbo]

By Jove, I think you've got it!

As for the title, it reminds me of those passages quoted by PO'B in the Aubrey/Maturin series concerning the mathematical formulae for finding leeway and so forth, so I always assumed it was probably a quote from some contemporary manual on seamanship. "Let XY represent a line upon a wind..." and so on.

[Mr. P]

Never thought of that. A very good guess.

My assumption was that, at some point in the 700-plus-page Odyssey, I'd run across someone reflecting on how the fate of England (and, by extension, all Europe) relied upon a slender line of wooden ships at the mercy of the shifting winds. An exhilarating and chilling thought, but now utterly without foundation.

[Old Dominion Tory]

A stunning post, Mr. Peperium. Allow me to raise a belated glass and make a toast to The Immortal Memory.

[Mr. P]

Thank you very much. There are aspects of the fight I ignored that I wish I hadn't--Schom points out that Villeneuve actually foresaw Nelson's attack plan, for example, giving that unhappy man some badly-needed credit. And yes indeed, I too will be doing the same toasting this evening with the best rum in the cupboard--belatedly, as there was a lot of homework to see to last evening.