“Redoutable
is a fine sailor, but we’ve run ahead of our station,” Lucas added.
“I think it’s splendid we’re leading the fleet,” I encouraged. “Joining with your allies and demonstrating smart sailing. It’s the kind of initiative that works well for our eventual book.”
The Combined Fleet trailed like a ragged group of geese. While the breeze was light there was a heavy, ominous swell on the otherwise smooth ocean, a sign of disturbance hundreds of miles away.
“Storm coming,” the helmsman muttered. The barometer was falling as well.
“Maybe we should put on all sail and hurry on ahead to the Mediterranean,” I suggested. “We can scout for Villeneuve by getting to Gibraltar first.”
“No. We’re out of position,” the captain decided. “We’ll tack and return to the center where we were assigned.”
“What? And give up the lead?”
But he wasn’t listening to me, shouting orders instead that sent seamen scurrying to halyards and sheets. We ponderously came about and ran back down the line of Gravina’s ships to rejoin the French center, much closer to Villeneuve than I preferred. By the sword of Spartacus, battle seemed to suck me in like Newton’s gravity! Instead of being on the edge, I was once more in the middle.
I stewed. What other ship could I escape to? The answer was none.
The British ships, meanwhile, had turned ninety degrees and were sailing directly toward us. Because we continued to drift south, by the time they intercepted us they’d collide with Dumanoir’s division of ships in our rear, probably overwhelming that third of the Combined Fleet before we could turn to help.
So at eight
A.M.
on Monday, October 21, Villeneuve gave up our run for Gibraltar, as well as safety and sanity, and in the name of honor and courage ordered the entire fleet to turn and sail back toward Cadiz. This tactic would protect Dumanoir by putting our center abreast the oncoming British, but also make battle unavoidable. The showdown had finally come. The only good news I could see was that it would allow survivors of a defeat to seek refuge in the Spanish port. Turning around would also throw the Combined Fleet into confusion.
“Tack in this light wind? Villeneuve is no seaman,” Lucas muttered.
It was so difficult to turn the ships that it took two awkward hours for all the vessels to come about. The result, despite incessant and increasingly frantic signals from Villeneuve, was a ragged crescent of a formation instead of a neat line. It was as if our line of ships had formed a shallow bowl to catch the incoming two-twined fork of British warships. What wind there was pushed the English straight at us, while we drifted leeward toward Cape Trafalgar.
Even I knew our formation was disorganized. I felt trapped, awaiting execution on a morning that crawled like syrup. Lucas’s officers fell silent, unhappy but determined. Villeneuve had given up the initiative and embraced the collision that Nelson wanted.
Our entire ship was quiet. I could clearly hear the creak of tackle as
Redoutable
rolled in the swells. Officers’ orders drifted up from the stillness of the gun decks to be heard on the quarter. Water sloshed and hissed. The approaching British ships loomed closer, their canvas growing in height like building thunderheads.
Battle ensigns went up on each side, flapping lazily in the hazy air.
Nelson’s fleet had broken into two columns, each aimed at a different point of our struggling line. Higher and higher their masts rose, and then their bows appeared over the horizon, cannon bristling on either side like thorns. We could see the wink of red from jacketed marines. There was little sound from the British ships, either, but they were a magnificent sight. Every sail had been set to catch the whispers of wind. They were like birds stretching their wings, straining to rush down on us, and yet advancing slower than a walk. I’ve never known such agonizing tedium as that long morning. Two fleets waited to duel, and the wind had gone on leave. The world seemed glacial.
Yet slowly we drifted toward collision.
The sun was entirely lost now in milky overcast. At eleven thirty
A.M.
, Villeneuve ordered French or Spanish pennants flown to identify each ship. Now there was a great rumble of drums, the soldiers aboard presenting arms. I snapped to attention without thinking about it, surprising myself, and looked about to see if anyone had noticed. None had, but I remembered Duhésme’s advice to join a unit, a cause, and a country. I was trapped, yet part of something, the thrill as oddly exciting as love.
Everyone was rigid from anticipation.
On the Spanish ships, a huge wooden cross was raised to hang from the mizzen boom, the religious symbol swaying over the taffrail at the ships’ rear. The French Catholics crossed themselves and kissed their own crucifixes.
On
Redoutable
, one of Napoleon’s new imperial eagles was brought from the captain’s cabin and presented to the crew to elicit shouts of “
Vive l’empereur
.” The standard was lashed to the mainmast.
The cheers gave spirit. The long months of chase and wait were finally over.
“You’d better take your place in the fighting top, Monsieur Gage,” Lucas said quietly behind me, making me jump.
I tilted my head back. “Up there?”
“As safe a place as any. Safer, if you use your rifle to good effect. Discourage the enemy by picking off his best men.”
I’d fixed a sling to my gun. Now I slung it over my shoulder, walked to the rail, and swung out over the ship’s side to stand on the wooden rails called chains, the water foamy far below. The tarred ropes attached there were reassuringly sticky, angling upward in a triangle to join the mizzenmast. My rifle bumped clumsily. I wore my worldly possessions: a few coins from Smith, the broken sword stub from Talleyrand, and my tomahawk, all tightly secured beneath my clothing.
Taking a breath, I began climbing the netlike ratlines that led aloft. The swells made the mast top pivot through ten degrees, and it was unnerving as we swayed. The higher I went, the wider the pendulum. I paused, steadied, took breath, and then kept going. Dozens of sharpshooters were doing the same. Looking neither up nor down but only where my hands must grab, I slowly ascended to the lubber’s hole next to the mast, clumsily squeezed through, and came up on the mizzen platform that would be my station. Ahead were similar platforms at main and foremast, crowded with soldiers. Each top extended three feet from the mast like a tree house, ratlines and rails giving security. The mast, wrapped with rope, was a comforting trunk at our back, extending far higher to more yards and sails above. A canvas screen had been lashed around the perimeter to hide us from view when we crouched to reload.
From here we would shoot to the enemy’s deck.
“It’s the American and his golden gun!”
“Now we’ll see if you shoot as fast as you talk, Gage.”
I had a splendid view of grandeur. Even Astiza, wise as she was about the insanity of war, would appreciate its beauty. I wished for the millionth time that she were beside me.
More than seventy ships were in view, sixty big enough to hammer it out in the main battle, and the fleets combined carried forty-one thousand men and thirty times the weight of artillery that would be used in a comparable land battle. We were riding the most complex, beautiful, and magnificent machines civilization had yet produced, works of art dedicated to the utter destruction of their counterpart. Each ship had acres of canvas, miles of ropes, and a city’s worth of stores. The English ships were painted like wasps, their black and yellow stripes broken by the yawning red mouths of gunport lids. The Combined Fleet was black and red. The clouds of canvas were massive as icebergs, and pennants seemed to float in the light breeze with the suspension of balloons. The
Santisima Trinidad
was a castle, looming over lesser ships.
The ships crawled, seeming almost frozen.
Then at last a signal ran up Villeneuve’s mast. “Open fire.”
A marine checked his watch. At noon, the first cannon boomed.
P
erched a hundred feet above the sea, I had a strange sense of detachment as the battle began. I felt wedged into a box seat, watching an elaborate stage production. The long, greasy swells kept us sharpshooters lazily rocking as if we were nested in a tree, the ships moving with the stately sway of giraffes. The quick thud of the French and Spanish guns seemed disconnected from this nautical minuet at first, too excited to fit the panorama’s languorous mood. But the gunfire slowly rose in frequency to become a rolling thunder, its urgency reminding me why we were here. The ocean began to erupt from splashing cannonballs. The shooting also settled the crews of the Combined Fleet, putting them to work. They cheered each rippling broadside, gray-white clouds of gunsmoke hanging like fog because there was almost no breeze to disperse it. As a result our hulls were gradually shrouded, and the shooting became half-blind.
The British ships sailed directly toward us in ominous silence, firing not a shot. Many of the French and Spanish cannons initially missed, demonstrating their lack of practice, and the Nelson columns glided ahead in a corridor of geysers. As the distance narrowed to five hundred yards, however, accuracy grew. I began to see splinters fly, ropes snap, and holes open up in sails, perforated into lace. Seven different vessels blasted away at the lead ship of Nelson’s southern column, chips spinning as if she were being whittled.
“
Royal Sovereign
,” a French marine sergeant reported after peering through his glass. “Not Nelson, but someone just as eager. Collingwood, perhaps.”
“Where’s Nelson then?”
He pointed to the lead ship of the northerly column, every possible sail set as it drifted downwind. “The one coming for
us
.”
Lucas had failed me, putting us in the path of the dangerous admiral instead of on the battle’s periphery.
You can never find a coward when you need one.
Fifteen minutes after the opening shots to the south the
Victory
came under our own fire, our guns rippling and our ship heeling to their kick. But the English flagship sailed majestically on, utterly silent, masts scraping heaven, sails swelling like a proud chest, and its sides bulging like a bicep and studded with guns. We were frantic to stop the enemy flagship before it pierced our line, and yet it seemed impervious to anything we did. Guns roared in broadside after broadside, and the sound boomed up to us in claps of air. Sailors’ ears would bleed even when wrapped in kerchiefs, and some would go deaf for days or a lifetime.
Finally, our attempt to slow and blind the enemy by blasting away at its rigging became successful. The studding sails that extended from the main yards of
Victory
were shot away, fluttering down like tumbling ducks. The foresail turned to ribbons. With stays cut, the mizzen topsail of the English ship snapped and tumbled, hanging awkwardly against lower lines and poised like an arrow at the helm below. A cannonball bounced off one of the English anchors and it sagged.
I could see the blue-coated English officers standing stiffly on their quarterdeck with little to do but demonstrate courage. The flagship’s great wheel disintegrated in a cloud of splinters. They flinched and stayed standing, even as the helmsmen died. The fresh black and yellow paint was beginning to be gouged with scars of raw wood. Nonetheless,
Victory
swung to starboard, obviously steered from somewhere below, and calmly passed down our line. Damnation! The perfect place to pierce our line was between
Bucentaure
, directly ahead, and
Redoutable
. This was as bad luck as at the Nile.
Victory
seemed almost impervious to the punishment it was taking, plowing ahead through a rain of cannonballs, but then a group of red-coated marines suddenly tumbled like pins in a bowl. A still-cradled ship’s boat erupted into pieces, its planks whirling like scythes. I heard English screams. Surely they’d turn away? The enemy flagship was taking a terrible pounding, and maybe we could really hammer it to a halt before Nelson achieved his melee. But no, for the first time the
Victory
’s port batteries let loose in return as she cruised down our line, the wood of French ships flinching from their punch. Stout wood quivered. Masts reeled.
Redoutable
had yet to receive any fire.
My mouth was dry, and I had to remember to swallow.
Then
Victory
turned again, to pierce our formation, and slid into a fog of French gunsmoke to slip at no more than walking pace between Villeneuve’s flagship and our own
Redoutable
. The three-decker was only eight feet higher, but it seemed to tower over us. The English were so close that I could clearly hear the calls of the British helmsman below, a calm, “Steady! Steady as she goes!” The hats of the officers were visible through the smoke as they paced like toy soldiers in a toy courtyard. The French marines began to fire at them.
“Shoot, shoot, American!”
There, could that be Nelson? I aimed at his foot and squeezed, hoping to chase the idiot to safety below. The shot struck the planking, and the man jumped but didn’t retreat. Why the pointless bravado?
To combat fear, I knew.
At the bow of the British ship I could see a crew crouched around an enormous sixty-eight-pound carronade, essentially a gigantic shotgun packed with five hundred musket balls. It was aimed not at us but at the windowed stern of
Bucentaure
on
Victory
’s other side, the mullioned glass glinting in the low, hazy sunlight of late October.
I wanted to shout warning, but it was pointless. Villeneuve knew his doom.
The English carronade fired.
The stern of
Bucentaure
dissolved into a penumbra of flying glass and window sash. The swarm of musket balls shot down the interior of the ship as if into a bag. There was an agonized bellow. The screams signaled to the lower decks of the English ship that they’d come within range, and as
Victory
slid across the stern of the French flagship, every other port gun, each loaded with two or three cannonballs, fired at point-blank range as it passed. More than a hundred round shot systematically crashed into Villeneuve’s command, creating havoc I could scarcely imagine. Cannon flipped and shattered. Companionway ladders dissolved into wooden splinters. The ship’s stern became a gaping cave, its interior splashed with blood like paint. Smoke rolled out from the ruins as if from a horizontal chimney.
In a single broadside, the French flagship was half-wrecked.
There was quiet as the British reloaded, enough so that I could hear the curses of French wounded floating across the water.
Then it was our turn. Captain Lucas shouted orders, the sound faint from my aerie, and we tried desperately to swing. Our bow strained to turn east so we could get our own guns parallel to the immense British flagship that was cutting our line ahead of us. But the wind remained feeble, the rudder sluggish, and we were too late. We’d punished the British ship as it had charged, and now it would have revenge.
Our bow slid into view of the cannon on
Victory
’s starboard side and once again its guns barked in turn, a steady thump like the pounding on a drum.
Redoutable
actually seemed to stutter and slow as the balls hit our prow, huge chunks of wood spiraling upward in crazy corkscrews. I saw cannonballs bounding off stout timbers and ricocheting out to splash. One of
Redoutable
’s two anchors was shot from its perch and plunged into the sea. Our foremast swayed in the storm of shot, yardarms and sails tumbling like limbs in a storm and punching through the netting to hit the deck with a crash. Sharpshooters on the foretop platform yelled as they fell, hitting the deck with a sickening thud. The mainmast swayed ominously, and the mizzen where I stood shuddered, meaning some of the cannonballs passed entirely through the
Redoutable
’s length and struck the base of our mast. I felt like a squirrel waiting while woodsmen chopped at my tree.
Better men than me report a strange coolness in battle, a sharpening of senses and attention to the business at hand that gives them robust courage.
Not today. This wasn’t my fight. I felt hideously exposed, caught in a nightmare from which I could not awake, my mind whirling.
“Reload, American!” Muskets went off in my ears, smoke stinging.
I did so mechanically but with deliberate slowness, not wanting to kill either English or French. The men around me shot ever more frantically, swearing in frustration as they sought to slow the English onslaught.
Victory
had raked two French ships at once, but now it was swinging parallel to
Redoutable
.
It was time to try the French tactics. “Hoist the grapnels!” Lucas cried.
We were about to collide and tie ourselves to the huge English flagship. Madness, madness! Yet the French soldiers and marines packed around me cheered lustily, anxious to wreak revenge against cannon with cutlass and grenade. I pressed back against the mast, happy to have the other sharpshooters between English bullets and me. One of our little company grunted and fell. His comrades unceremoniously bent, hoisted, and threw him over. Another abruptly sat, wounded and coughing, blood frothing at his lips. He was allowed to stay. English marines were crouched behind bulwarks, shooting up at us as we shot down at them.
The
Victory
could have avoided our boarding challenge by standing off, but instead swung toward us so that we angled together and crashed at the front. The
Redoutable
shook with the impact, but crewmen began assembling to board. A charge was our only chance. Meanwhile, the shattered
Bucentaure
with Admiral Villeneuve was drifting slowly north from
Victory
, no longer able to control the Combined Fleet and hammered again and again as other British ships broke the French and Spanish line and pounded it. Masts cracked and toppled. Guns disintegrated into fragments after being struck by a ball or overheating. Marines pitched from its rigging.
I looked out at the entire battle. By now it was cloaked with smoke. Clouds from sixty furiously firing ships had piled to the mast tops, so what I saw was a sea of fog lit by the flash of thousands of cannon. Metal shrieked, hissed, and flew so copiously that it occasionally rang like bells as opposing cannonballs collided in mid-air. The English seemed able to fire at demonic speed. As they out-paced the enemy more and more Combined Fleet guns fell silent, increasing Nelson’s advantage. They were gnawing us to impotence.
The battle was devolving into the pell-mell pounding that the admiral had wished for, capitalizing on the superiority of British training. With yards, sails, and entire masts coming down like crumbling scaffolding, warships dragged ever more ponderously. A broadside would ripple out, pulverizing a helplessly drifting opponent, and then long agonizing minutes of quiet would pass as the guns were laboriously reloaded and one ship or the other was brought around to repeat the cannonade. Knots of two, three, and four ships formed, some shooting all the way through a riddled enemy hull and accidentally hitting an ally on the other side. The clogging dead were unceremoniously tossed overboard, forming lines of floating corpses in tidal eddies.
There was only one rule. The faster you could kill, the greater the chance of not being killed.
Grapnels lashed the
Victory
and
Redoutable
together. The two hulls ground in the sickening swell, tumble homes touching like two breasts, and yardarms reached for each other like crisscrossing fingers. The ship’s rails, however, were several yards apart because of the bulge of the ships’ hulls. The gap was too far to leap and this put the
Redoutable
in a dilemma. Lucas had assumed he’d be fighting another two-decker, but Nelson’s path had linked him to a mighty three. That meant the British rail was a full deck above our own; the English sailors could leap down onto us but the French would have to climb up to them. Nor could Lucas’s men see who might be waiting for them, unless we on the mast tops cried warning.
Meanwhile, the two ships blasted into each other’s hulls. They were so close that Nelson’s crew no longer bothered to run out their guns after recoil, and in fact hurled buckets of water on their French enemy right after shooting so the muzzle flashes wouldn’t set both ships on fire. The gun decks were absolute pandemonium, guns leaping with each discharge, smoke so thick you couldn’t see, noise so loud you couldn’t hear, and comrades crushed as they fell. Some cannons were dismounted and shattered by screaming shot, setting off secondary explosions.
The only thing that kept terror at bay was the inability of any one man to see all the havoc; no one entirely knew what was happening beyond the little world of his own gun crew. I had an eagle’s view but was masked by smoke, so I felt more than saw the howling shot smashing
Redoutable
’s innards. The mizzenmast kept shaking as if thrashed by bear.
“Shoot, shoot, you damned American!” The topmen were hurling grenades that exploded with a flash in the fog.
My reluctance to fire meant I had time to see things the others missed. I grabbed the sleeve of the man who’d shouted and pointed toward the bow of the British ship. “We have to warn your comrades!”
About fifty French had emerged from the chaos belowdecks with sword, pike, and pistol, and were bunching on our foredeck to scramble up to the British vessel in hopes of seizing it. What they couldn’t see was that the starboard carronade, the one that hadn’t been used, was being swiveled to point at Lucas’s prepared attack. The massed boarders made a perfect target.
“There, there, shoot the English gunners!” the marine yelled to his fellows. “Swing down, American, and warn Captain Lucas!”
I left my rifle and slipped back through the lubber’s hole to shout out the danger so the French target of men could disperse. It seemed a wonderfully neutral task between shooting my British friends and refusing to do so for the French. I did shout warning, but couldn’t hear it myself in the roar of battle. I was also clumsy as the rigging swayed, and as slow descending the ratlines as I’d climbed. I felt sluggish, a fly on a sticky web.