Nelson (121 page)

But Nelson’s ship was now little more than a wreck. For more than two hours she had been embroiled in an unequal broadside-for-broadside struggle, engaging five or more of the enemy ships at point-blank range, every one of them more powerfully armed than she was. She had suffered more damage than any other ship in the British fleet, and lay almost incapable of manoeuvre. Her mainmast had three shot holes to what Nelson insisted was its ‘heart’, her fore topmast had gone over the side, and her jib blown away. Every yard was damaged and every larboard shroud gone, along with all but one of the braces. The stays, rigging and sails were ripped to pieces, and the wheel that controlled the rudder shot away. Several guns were disabled by ‘numberless hits’, while the rest were low on powder, shot and grape. Nelson’s resourceful gunners were having to use nine-pounder shot to make up deficiencies in the larger calibres, and firing seven at a discharge.
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Men were also dropping, twenty-five alone on Nelson’s blood-spattered quarterdeck. As Nelson and Miller controlled the battle amid shot, grape, bullets and flying debris one man after another was scythed down around them. Major William Morris of the marines was cut down, and one of Miller’s young aides. A shot flashed so close to Miller himself that the wind bruised his thigh, while a splinter from a block hit the side of Nelson’s abdomen with such force that it bowled him off his feet. Miller, who had come to believe his commodore ‘a most noble fellow’, caught him before he fell, ‘shockingly alarmed at
the idea of losing him’, but Nelson soon regained his equanimity. He carried on blithely though the wound would worry him for the rest of his life.
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Nevertheless, the attrition could not continue. Horribly mauled the
San Nicolas
may have been, but she could still bite, and was firing on both the
Captain
and the
Prince George
. In appalling fire over a mere twenty yards she killed or wounded fifteen to seventeen men on Nelson’s ship in a few minutes. On the shambles of his quarterdeck, the commodore realised that the
Captain
was almost spent. She might slink to leeward, out of the battle, but manoeuvring against the wind to fight was entirely another matter. But there was one more alternative.

Nelson ordered Miller to run the wrecked seventy-four upon the
San Nicolas
and called for boarders.

The
San Nicolas
could hardly avoid the collision. In recoiling from the
Excellent
’s thunder strokes she had fouled the three-decked
San Josef
on her windward side and was still boxed in. Miller threw the
Captain
’s helm hard over, and the ship lurched towards the imprisoned Spaniard, crunching her bow against the enemy starboard quarter. The British bowsprit pushed over the poop deck of the
San Nicolas
and locked her spritsail yard into the Spanish mizzen shrouds. That bowsprit would become a bridge to the enemy’s upper decks.

Nelson’s boarders were scurrying up from below and massing at the front of the ship. Rugged tars bristling with sharp boarding pikes, cutlasses, pistols and tomahawks, and grim-faced, redcoated soldiers of the 11th and 69th regiments serving as marines, their muskets primed and bayonets fixed. They were embarking upon a desperate venture. The Royal Navy’s advantages in gunnery and seamanship would be of no further use to them once they stormed the enemy ship. This matter would be settled by hot blood and cold steel.

The numbers may have been about equal. Both sides had already suffered heavy casualties. The
San Nicolas
was the larger ship, with a complement well in excess of six hundred, many of them soldiers, but many of her men were down. The
Captain
, on the other hand, was carrying a number of supernumeraries in addition to her ship’s company and marines, and many of them were Maltese and ex-Austrian soldiers. Two days before the battle Miller had mustered some six hundred and forty serviceable men.
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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.
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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.
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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 . . .’
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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.
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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.
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