Nelson: The Essential Hero (57 page)

Hardy returned to the quarter-deck, having been about eight minutes below with his dying friend. Blackwood was one of the few others who learned that Nelson was dying. He desperately wanted to see him, but the
Euryalus
had Collingwood’s
Royal Sovereign
under tow. (Her masts had been badly damaged in the action with the
Santa Anna,
the latter having finally struck her colours.) Upon the tow being, accidentally cut by a shot, Blackwood, instead of trying to pass another, hauled off and made for the
Victory.
He got aboard and was told that the Admiral was still alive, but on reaching the cockpit he found him already dead. During his last moments Nelson had asked his steward, Chevalier, to turn him on his right side, saying, ‘I wish I had not left the deck, for I shall soon be gone.’ He pined for that sea air which he had known all his life, even heavy as now with gun-smoke, blowing over the open spaces of the planking where in his time he had walked so very many miles. He said little after Hardy had gone, only brief requests such as ‘Drink, drink’, ‘Fan, fan’ and ‘Rub, rub’ - the latter addressed to Doctor Scott who had been massaging his chest, which seemed to give him some relief. At one moment he said to Scott in a faint voice, ‘Doctor, I have
not
been a
great
sinner,’ and then,
‘Remember
that I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter as a legacy to my Country — never forget Horatia.’ His last words, several times repeated, were: ‘Thank God, I have done my duty.’ At length he was silent. Doctor Scott and Mr Burke, who all this time had held up the cot at an angle that seemed to give Nelson some relief, said no more to the dying man. Chevalier tiptoed from the scene and went to Mr Beatty who came at once and knelt by his side. He took up the Admiral’s hand and found no pulse discernible in the wrist. The Log of the
Victory
written in pencil by the Midshipman of the Watch records: ‘Partial firing continued until 4.30, when a victory having been reported to the Right Hon. Lord Viscount Nelson, K.B., and Commander-in-Chief, he died of his wound.’

Half an hour later, as if to set the seal upon the awesome scene of disabled ships, struggling men and floating wreckage - all varnished with a haze of smoke - there came a tremendous explosion. The
Achilles
, which had been dismasted and had then caught fire, had blown up. An officer in the
Defence
remembered : ‘It was a sight the most awful and grand that can be conceived. In a moment the hull burst into a cloud of smoke and fire. A column of vivid flame shot up to an enormous height in the atmosphere and terminated by expanding into an immense globe, representing, for a few seconds, a prodigious tree in flames, speckled with many dark spots, which the pieces of timber and bodies of men occasioned while they were suspended in the clouds.’ The whole incident was reminiscent of that other occasion when, on the dark waters of Aboukir Bay, the explosion of
L'Orient
had signalled the first of Nelson’s great victories.

Trafalgar was the fitting culmination of Nelson's life-work. As Chaucer wrote: The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge.

Eighteen of the Combined Fleet had either been taken as prizes or destroyed while the British, although many of them badly mauled, had lost only a single ship. The ruin of Napoleon’s ambitions at sea was complete. Of the ships that escaped from the holocaust of Trafalgar, eleven which reached Cadiz never put to sea again, while Rear-Admiral Dumanoir’s squadron, which had run to the southward, was captured by Sir Richard Strachan later in the year.

Three things were responsible for the British victory at Cape Trafalgar: Nelson’s genius in devising an unorthodox, risky, but brilliant manner of attack; the superiority of British seamanship, honed by the long months of blockading duties, while the enemy had grown stale in harbour; and, above all, by the marked superiority of British gunnery. Nelson was a master in the harsh art of war, a personally gentle man who was a genius in administering death. His own death, at the climax of his greatest battle, laid a classical laurel on his brow. He did not die too soon. Beatty, who later conducted the autopsy on his body, remarked that ‘all the vital parts were so perfectly healthy in appearance, and so small, that they resembled more those of a youth, than of a man who had attained his forty-seventh year’. He concluded that, in view of Nelson’s temperate habits, there was every reason to believe that he might have lived to a ripe old age. But there was another and darker side to the surgeon’s report: ‘Had he lived a few years longer, and continued at sea, he would have lost his sight totally.’

The expected gale came up from the south-west. Collingwood did not anchor, for he considered it better for the fleet to wear and stand out westward into the open sea. In this he may well have been right, although partisans of Nelson maintain that not so many of the prizes would have been lost if the Admiral’s last order had been transmitted and obeyed. It is somewhat doubtful, in view of the condition of the ships after one of the hardest fought battles on record, if any more would have survived had they anchored. Indeed, in some cases it would have been impossible to do so, for either their anchors had been lost or their anchor cables had been too badly damaged to be serviceable. Storm, heavy rain and all-obscuring nimbus clouds followed on the death of the Sea-King, and for four days neither sun, moon, nor stars were seen. The savaged ships clawed their way off shore, while to their lee the shoals and rocks off-lying Cape Trafalgar roared to the boom and thunder of the westerly. Logs of the ships all tell the same tale. The
Spartiate
: ‘Fresh gales with hard rain - fleet and prizes much scattered.’ The
Phoebe
: ‘Lost three whole hawsers and 100 fathoms of rope endeavouring to take
L'Aigle
and
Fougueux
in tow.’ Midshipman Barker of the
Swiftsure
recalled : ‘On the 22nd it came on a most Violent Gale of wind. The Prize in Tow, the
Redoutable
, seemed to weather it out tolerable well notwithstanding her shattered state until about three in the afternoon, when from her rolling so violently in a heavy sea, she carried away her fore Mast, the only mast she had standing.’ Here, as in many other cases, Nelson’s last prayer that ‘humanity after Victory [should] be the predominant feature in the British fleet’ was answered. Barker continues : ‘Towards the evening she repeatedly made signals of distress to us: we now hoisted out our boats, and sent them on board of her although there was a very high Sea, and we were afraid the boats would be swampt alongside the Prize, but they happily succeeded in saving a great number.’ Lieutenant Edwards of the
Prince
described the fate of the ship which the midshipman of the
Neptune
had earlier admired as a ‘superb man-of-war’: We had the
Santissima Trinidad
, the largest ship in the world in tow. ’Tis impossible to describe the horrors the morning presented, nothing but signals of distress flying in every direction. The signal was made to destroy the prizes. We had no time before to remove the prisoners; but what a sight when we came to remove the wounded, of which there were between three and four hundred.

We had to tie the poor mangled wretches round their waists, and lower them down into a tumbling boat, some without arms, others no legs, and lacerated all over in the most dreadful manner.

The news of Nelson’s death became swiftly known throughout the fleet and an immense sadness followed hard on the heels of the exhilaration of victory. (When the news of Trafalgar reached London on 6 November, the triumph of the event was almost overshadowed by the sense of loss that his death inspired.) Far away in Naples the poet Coleridge, who was passing through the city on his way home after a period of being Private Secretary to Sir Alexander Ball in Malta, wrote how, ‘When Nelson died, it seemed as if no man was a stranger to another: for all were made acquaintances in the rights of a common anguish. . . . Numbers stopped and shook hands with me, because they had seen the tears on my cheek, and conjectured that I was an Englishman; and some, as they held my hand, burst, themselves, into tears.’ Blackwood writing to his wife on the day after the battle could not conceal his grief : ‘A Victory, such a one as has never been achieved, yesterday took place in the course of five hours; but at such an expense, in the loss of the most gallant man, and best of friends, as renders it to me a Victory I never wished to have witnessed - at least on such terms.’ He did not fail to pay tribute to the enemy : They waited the attack of the British with a coolness I was sorry to witness. And they fought in a way that must do them honour. As a spectator, who saw the faults, or rather mistakes, on both sides, I shall ever do them the justice to say so. They are, however, beat. . . . Buonaparte, I firmly believe, forced them to sea to try his luck, and what it might procure him in a pitched battle. They had the flower of the Combined Fleet, and I hope it will convince Europe at large that he has not yet learnt enough to cope with the English at sea.

A humble sailor in a letter home summed up the feelings of all the battle-weary, storm-tossed men whose discipline, courage and endurance had made the victory possible. 'I never set eyes on him,’ he wrote, ‘for which I am both sorry and glad, for to be sure I should like to have seen him, but then, all the men in our ship are such soft toads, they have done nothing but Blast their Eyes and cry ever since he was killed. God bless you! chaps that fought like the Devil sit down and cry like a wench.’

Napoleon’s only official comment on the battle read: ‘Gales have caused the loss of several vessels after a battle which had been entered upon imprudently.’ The fact remained that the British ships, which had also taken heavy punishment in the engagement, did not run ashore or founder - although many, including the badly damaged
Victory
, had a very hard time in weathering the storm. Collingwood, commenting in a letter that only four of the prizes had been saved to be towed to Gibraltar, remarked: ‘I can only say that in my life I never saw such exertions as were made to save those Ships. It more astonished the Spaniards than the beating they got; and one of them said, when I assured him that none of our Ships were lost, “How can we contend with such a people, on whom the utmost violence of the elements has no effect ?” ’

Collingwood’s list of the fate of the flag-officers of the Combined Fleet tells the story of Trafalgar quite as clearly as any detailed account of the damage suffered by the individual ships. The Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Villeneuve, aboard the
Bucentaure
was taken prisoner. (Later, repatriated from England to his native land, this unfortunate but far from cowardly admiral took his own life.) The Spanish Admiral Don Federico Gravina aboard the
Principe de Asturias
managed to escape to Cadiz, although badly wounded in the right arm. The Spanish Vice-Admiral Don Ignatio Maria d’Alava aboard the
Santa Anna
suffered a severe head wound, was captured, but then during the chaos of the storm escaped into Cadiz in his devastated ship. Rear-Admiral Cisneros of the
Santissima Trinidad
was captured, the French Rear-Admiral Magon of the
Algeciras
was killed. Rear-Admiral Dumanoir on board the
Formidable
escaped and, as we know, together with his squadron of four ships, was later captured by Sir Richard Strachan.

Nelson’s body was put into a leaguer, one of the largest casks carried aboard ship, after his hair had been cut off and he had been stripped of all his clothes save a shirt. The cask was then filled with brandy - not rum as is often said (hence the inaccurate navy slang for rum, ‘Nelson’s blood’) - brandy being the purest type of spirit on board. At Gibraltar the body was transferred into spirits of wine, the best preservative available. Beatty records the macabre story of how the admiral’s body made its last journey to Gibraltar : In the evening after this melancholy task had been accomplished, the gale came on with violence from the South-west, and continued that night and the succeeding day without any abatement. During this boisterous weather, Lord Nelson’s body remained under the charge of a sentinel on the middle deck. The cask was placed on its end, having a closed aperture at its top and another below; the object of which was, that as a frequent renewal of the spirit was thought necessary, the old could thus be drawn off below and fresh quantity introduced above, without moving the cask, or occasioning the least agitation of the Body. On the 24th there was a disengagement of air from the Body to such a degree, that the sentinel became alarmed on seeing the head of the cask raised : he therefore applied to the Officers, who were under the necessity of having the cask spiked to give the air a discharge.

On 28 October, the
Victory
, under tow from the
Neptune
, came in under the shadow of the great Rock. Gibraltar, the symbol of the sea-power of Britain, to which Nelson had devoted his life, frowned with guns and the half-masted British flag flew over all. Ships surged and swayed in the anchorage, and all the while the never-ceasing current poured from the grey Atlantic into the Mediterranean. ‘The Keel of a Ship’, said the ancients, ‘leaves no trace’, but Nelson had signed his name for ever upon the great tumbled ocean as well as upon the ancient inland sea.

A
south-west
gale hurled down the Thames on
8
January 1806, the day that Nelson’s body was conveyed up river from Greenwich to Whitehall. It had lain in state in Wren’s magnificent Painted Hall, and over 30,000 people had filed past the coffin of the man whom they had come to love not only as the heroic defender of their country but as a beloved son. Dr Scott, his devoted chaplain, had stayed by the coffin in a vigil to which he had clearly committed himself in those last hours when he had rubbed Nelson’s breast, heard his final words, and watched him die. Now the body was destined for the full pomp and ceremony of a state funeral, a funeral surpassing any other within living memory, a funeral indeed such as he would have planned for himself. What would further have pleased him was that he was to be buried in St Paul’s and not in Westminster Abbey. It was true that in earlier days he had more than once expressed the wish to reach the Valhalla of the Abbey if he were to die in battle, but more recently he had remarked that if he were ‘to be interred at the public expense, I wish to be buried in St Paul’s rather than in Westminster Abbey. I heard an old tradition when I was a boy that Westminster Abbey is built on a spot where once existed a deep morass, and I think it likely that the lapse of time will reduce the ground on which it now stands to its primitive state of a swamp, without leaving a trace of the Abbey.’