V The ‘Fighting’ Téméraire
WHERE, HOW, AND WHEN SHE MADE HER NAME
Heard ye the thunder of battle
Low in the south and afar?
Saw ye the flush of the death-cloud,
Crimson o’er Trafalgar?
Such another day never
England will look on again,
When the battle fought was the hottest,
And the hero of heroes was slain.
Francis Turner Palgrave.
In England’s song for ever
She’s the Fighting Téméraire.
Henry Newbolt.
Trafalgar was her day. It was at Trafalgar that the Téméraire made her mark and won undying fame.
First of all—
She came to Nelson’s aid,
The battle’s brunt to bear,
And nobly sought to lead the van,
The Brave Old Téméraire.
Then she was ‘the Victory’s companion in her closing strife,’ as Mr. Ruskin has called the Téméraire, ‘prevailing over the fatal vessel that had given Nelson death.’79 That is one of the reasons why people remember the Téméraire. There is another—that all the world knows. To learn it one has only to visit the National Gallery. Turner’s masterpiece has made the Téméraire’s name a household word all the world over. But, all the same, had Turner never painted his picture at all, even without the aid of Turner’s magic brush, the Téméraire must surely, for the part she took in the greatest sea-fight of history, have achieved for her name an immortal renown.
How Turner came to paint his ‘Fighting Téméraire’ is a story in itself. The famous picture came into being by the merest accident; as the outcome of a happy chance, as the result of a casual meeting with the old ship at a water-picnic on the Thames one autumn evening of the year 1838.80 Turner, with Clarkson Stanfield and some friends, was boating off Greenwich marshes in Blackwall Reach when the old ship passed them, coming up the river from Sheerness to meet her destined end off Rotherhithe, where the shipbreaker Beatson’s men were waiting for her. She had been sold out of the service some days before for £5530, barely the market value of the copper bolts that held her timbers together—just a twelfth of the prime cost of the ship’s hull in labour and materials, or one-twentieth of the total value of the ship, gunned and equipped for sea. Forlorn enough, and a thing for pity, looked the grand old man-of-war as the Sheerness men had left her, her sails stripped from the yards, her tiers of ports without guns and closed down, her hull with its last coat of dockyard drab all rusty-looking and weather-stained, cast off and discarded, as it were a broken warrior being borne to a pauper’s grave.
[‘Turner saw the tug and ship just before entering Greenwich Reach, and when before rounding the Isle of Dogs she would be steering about South-South-East up Blackwall Reach, with the summer setting sun astern of her in the North-North-West.’—Mr. R.C. Leslie in the Athenæum.]
Two tugs had the ship in tow, as contemporary accounts of the Téméraire’s arrival in the river relate, not one, as Turner has painted the memorable scene.81 In Turner’s picture the Téméraire is shown passing the water-party before she rounded the Isle of Dogs, when heading south-south-east up Blackwall Reach, with the September sun setting astern of the ship to the north-west. ‘There’s a fine picture, Turner,’ said Stanfield, pointing to the war-worn veteran of the sea as she stemmed her way past them, and Turner went home full of the idea to reproduce the scene on canvas, with touches of his own, to give the world a picture ‘of all pictures of subjects not involving human pain,’ says Mr. Ruskin, ‘the most pathetic that ever was painted.’82
Now the sunset breezes shiver,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
And she’s fading down the river,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
Now the sunset breezes shiver,
And she’s fading down the river,
But in England’s song for ever
She’s the Fighting Téméraire.83
The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up,’ was the title Turner gave his picture when he sent it in to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1839. He added these lines, composed apparently by himself—
‘The flag that braved the battle and the breeze
No longer owns her.’
The ‘Fighting’ Téméraire was an Essex ship, built—nine-tenths of her—of oak cut in Hainault forest and sent across to Chatham dockyard, where the Téméraire’s keel was laid in July 1793.84 Tuesday, the 11th of September 1798, was the day of her launch, ‘a squally day with drenching rain.’ She was a three-decker, a second-rate, ‘a ninety-eight,’ in the Navy parlance of the time, a ship carrying ninety-eight guns (32-pounders, 18’s, and long 12’s, with twelve carronades as well), throwing a broadside weight of metal at each discharge of 1336 lbs., very nearly twelve cwts.—three-fifths of a ton of solid cast iron. ‘She is one of the finest ships that we have seen,’ wrote an officer who inspected the Téméraire on the stocks a little while before she was launched.
An Essex man captained the Téméraire at Trafalgar, Eliab Harvey, of Rolls Park, Chigwell, Essex. He was a great-grandson of Eliab Harvey, brother of Dr. William Harvey the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, by whose side he now lies buried in the family vault under the Harvey Chapel in Hempstead Church, near Saffron Walden. All Essex, we are told, was represented at the funeral, or followed the coffin to its last resting-place. Captain Harvey, during the time that he commanded the Téméraire, had also a seat in Parliament for the county of Essex, in accordance with a political usage of those days which enabled officers on active service to represent constituencies at Westminster, although Ministers apparently did not always find it satisfactory. ‘I don’t like your M.P. Navy Captains,’ said Castlereagh once; ‘they are always off Cape Finisterre when they are wanted, and when they are sent for they say they don’t like being “whistled up merely to give a vote.”’ Those who know their Marryat will remember the case of the Hon. Captain Delmar, M.P., of H.M.S. Paragon, a frigate in the Channel Squadron, ‘which was never sea-going except in the Recess.’ It was better though than this with the Téméraire, which Captain Harvey commissioned for the ‘Western Squadron,’ as in those days the Channel Fleet was generally called, at Plymouth, in November 1803, six months after the outbreak of the Great War with Napoleon.
Strange as it may seem to us, the Téméraire’s name at that moment had for most people an unpleasant ring about it. The shadow of a terrible tragedy rested just then over the name Téméraire. The public had not yet got over the shock with which, barely two years before, the whole country had learnt that the crew of one of the flagships of the Channel Fleet, while lying in Bantry Bay, had mutinied, and offered violence to their Admiral and officers, using ugly threats and proposing to point guns loaded with grape-shot to sweep the quarter-deck. Nor had people forgotten the grim sequel, the relentless severity of the retribution that fell on the ringleaders; how eleven of the Téméraire’s men had been hanged at the yard-arm, two flogged through the fleet at Spithead, receiving two hundred lashes each, seven sent to the hulks for life. The newspapers had been full of the terrible story, as related day by day in the evidence at the two courts-martial that sat at Portsmouth to try the mutineers. The trial lasted five days, and the report of it in the Times of the 13th of January 1802 took up the whole paper, all but two columns. Nor had the following paragraph which appeared in the Naval Chronicle, done any good to the Téméraire’s reputation:—‘Plymouth, October 7th, 1802; The seamen of the Téméraire of 98-guns, Rear-Admiral Campbell, paid off, put on crape hat-bands round their straw hats in memory of the mutineers in that ship who were executed for the mutiny in Bantry Bay last year.’ That unhappy episode in the ship’s story was, however, as far as the Téméraire herself was concerned, now past and done with. Now the Téméraire had a new ship’s company throughout; captain, officers, and men, with a future of their own before them.
Captain Harvey manned his ship to a large extent with Liverpool men, sent round from the Mersey by tender, and sailed from Cawsand Bay on the 11th of March 1804, to join Admiral Cornwallis off Brest.
It was perhaps the most critical period in our national history. On the heights above Boulogne lay Napoleon’s Grand Army, 160,000 men, waiting for the French fleet to put to sea and secure its passage across the Straits of Dover.85 The fate of England depended on the British Navy. There were twenty-one French line-of-battle ships in Brest, six others at Rochefort, and five sheltering in the Spanish port of Ferrol. At Brest, also, there were known to be upwards of 20,000 French soldiers; and another 20,000 under Augereau were under canvas at Rochefort, ‘supposed against Ireland,’ according to Admiral Cornwallis’s instructions from the Admiralty. It was the business of the Channel Fleet to hold the enemy in check at all points from Ushant Island, off Brest, to Cape Finisterre, and prevent aid from elsewhere arriving to enable them to put to sea. At the same time, as his appointed part in the great strategic plan of campaign, Nelson off Toulon kept his tireless watch over the French Mediterranean Fleet. Thus the toils were set, the gambit was opened.
‘They were dull, weary, eventless months,’ says Captain Mahan in one of his most telling passages,86 ‘those months of watching and waiting of the big ships before the French arsenals. Purposeless they surely seemed to many, but they saved England. The world has never seen a more impressive demonstration of the influence of sea-power upon its history. Those far-distant storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.’
It was Napoleon with all the resources of his Empire in its full vigour at his back, Napoleon at the zenith of his intellect and genius for war, Napoleon in the year before Austerlitz—baffled and held at arm’s length by the British Navy. One has only to glance at the daily newspapers of 1804 to realise the superb self-confidence with which Great Britain braced herself to meet the threatening peril. The nation knew its strength and on what, under Providence, it relied; the nation knew it and the Navy knew it—as we too, after forgetting it for a time, have in these later years at length come again to recognise the vital root-fact of Great Britain’s existence—
No track of men, no footsteps to and fro
Lead to her gates. The path lies o’er the sea
Invincible.
Six months of pitching and rolling in the dreary Bay of Biscay was the Téméraire’s lot at the outset, as one of Vice-Admiral Calder’s squadron watching Rochefort. The most disliked of all billets perhaps was blockade duty off the Basque Roads, ever facing the dreary sand dunes of Aix and Oléron, stretching wearily along the featureless coast, there and back, between Sables d’Olonne and the mouth of the Gironde, buffeted week in week out by persistent gales and rough weather. All there was to do, practically, was now and again to stop some wretched neutral passing by—usually a Portuguese trading brig, or a Prussian galliot, for or from Bordeaux—and examine her papers; but for days together sometimes—
The Wind at the West or thereabout,
Nothing gone in and nothing come out,
was all that went down in their logs, according to the refrain on the dull routine of their daily life of a gun-room ditty composed on board one of the ships blockading Rochefort. Every two or three months, as her turn came round, one or other of the ships would part company for a week or ten days and proceed to Cawsand Bay—communicating on the way with the fleet off Brest to take letters for England—to fill up her water-casks and take in fresh stores and provisions, overhaul spars and rigging, and then return bringing bullocks and bread and vegetables for the squadron. That was their only relaxation. In her turn, towards the end of May, the Téméraire went in to Cawsand Bay, as the ‘Plymouth Report’ of the Naval Chronicle records.
May 26.—Came in from the Channel Fleet, which she left all well, last Wednesday, the Téméraire of 98 guns. The enemy as usual. Our frigates frequently go in to reconnoitre within a mile and a half of the outer-most ships, and within range of their shots and shells of which the enemy give them plenty but without damage.
In August, when Collingwood had relieved Calder, a closer watch on the enemy than before was maintained, owing to the prevalence of rumours that the French were on the point of putting to sea. Collingwood, we are told, frequently passed the night on the quarter-deck of his flagship, at intervals lying down on a gun-carriage to snatch a short sleep, ‘from which Admiral Collingwood would rise from time to time to sweep the horizon with his night glass lest the enemy should escape in the dark.’87 The French, though, remained quiet all the time. One or two of their ships would come out now and then and exercise at sail drill in Basque Roads, and they had a small sham fight once, but no attempt was made to run or force the blockade.
September saw the Téméraire transferred from the Rochefort squadron to ‘the Team’ off Brest, as the big ship division of Cornwallis’s main fleet was familiarly called in the Navy. There was more to do and see off Brest, perhaps, but the life there was no less hard and toilsome. The three-deckers cruised by themselves outside Ushant, patrolling night and day; keeping far out to seaward when the wind was from the west, and, as the standing order ran, ‘well up with Ushant in an easterly wind.’ Off Black Rocks, between Ushant and the mainland, cruised four or six two-deckers, the ‘Inshore Squadron’; while close in, off the mouth of Brest Harbour itself, just out of gunshot of the shore batteries, watching every move in the French fleet as it lay at anchor in the roadstead, were frigates and cutters on the look-out. Every day they expected the enemy to leave port, but, as it had been off Rochefort, in vain.
Then the winter storms set in, hard gales continuously and squally weather. Twice during October severe storms from the south-west compelled Cornwallis to stand off the coast and bear up for Torbay: to lie there with the ‘Blue Peter’ at the fore, and not a soul allowed on shore, until at the first sign of the wind shifting anchors were weighed for Brest again. In November a rough north-easter drove part of the fleet off the station many leagues out into the Atlantic. The rest found shelter on the enemy’s own coast, in Douarnenez Bay, less than twenty miles from Brest, and rode the storm out there. ‘It is with great satisfaction,’ says the Times of the 16th of November 1804, ‘we understand that our fleet off Brest, has withstood the violent gales which have of late prevailed, and continues to maintain that vigilant position, which, we trust, will effectually obstruct the designs of the enemy.’88 December and the January of the New Year (1805) brought worse weather still, a succession of fierce gales—‘it blows harder than ever we remember,’ wrote the Naval Chronicle’s Portsmouth correspondent in January—that crippled half the fleet and forced Cornwallis to spend all February and half March repairing damages in Torbay. Seven of the big ships, leaking seriously, with hulls strained, gear swept overboard, masts sprung, spars carried away, had to go into dock at Plymouth, among them the Téméraire, whose repairs took two months to make good.
[The tents north of the harbour (to the reader’s left) belong to Vandamme’s Division of Marshal Soult’s Army Corps (the 4th). Those to the south belong to an outlying brigade of Marshal Ney’s Corps (the 6th). The camp inland is that of Suchet’s and St. Hilaire’s Divisions of Soult’s Corps. Napoleon’s headquarters were near Mont Lambert, the hill crowned by a signal station. In the centre of the sketch are seen the masts of the ‘Invasion Flotilla’ behind a breakwater mounting heavy guns.]
She rejoined the flag off Brest in April, just as the startling news came to hand that the French Toulon Fleet had appeared off Cadiz, joined hands with the Spanish Fleet there and gone off westward. Their destination was unknown and there was no news of Lord Nelson. All that month of May the Téméraire and her consorts off Brest held themselves ready to clear for action at the shortest notice, daily expecting the sails of Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet to appear on the horizon to the south-west. As if awaiting Villeneuve’s arrival, also, the whole of the Brest fleet had come out of harbour and was riding at single anchor, twenty-one sail of the line completely equipped for sea, under the cliff batteries of Bertheaume Bay. The British fleet off Brest for the moment could only muster seventeen sail. In England, meanwhile, the newspapers were full of accounts of how the Grand Army at Boulogne, now vauntingly styled l’Armée d’Angleterre, was duly holding embarkation and landing parades and drills on the sea-shore under the eyes of Soult and Ney. At the end of the month intelligence arrived that Villeneuve was in the West Indies, and that Nelson had gone in pursuit of him. June passed in waiting for information of Villeneuve’s return to Europe, the Channel Fleet being continuously reinforced from England, which enabled Collingwood and a ‘Special Service’ squadron to be detached to keep guard off Cadiz and the Straits of Gibraltar. On the 11th of July came the news that Villeneuve had been sighted in Mid-Atlantic, homeward bound; after which, a fortnight later, came the further news that Admiral Calder had had an indecisive battle with the enemy off Cape Finisterre, and that Villeneuve had put into Ferrol. Calder himself rejoined Cornwallis a few days afterwards, and then Nelson came in with his fleet.
Cornwallis, from the ships now at his disposal, immediately made up a new fleet of eighteen sail of the line to blockade Villeneuve in Ferrol. It was placed under Calder’s orders and sent off on the 16th of August. The Téméraire sailed with Calder, and so the story of her service with the ‘Western Squadron’ ends.
Before they arrived off Ferrol they heard from a frigate that Villeneuve had left the port. He had put to sea as though intending to cross the Bay of Biscay direct to Brest, but when two days out, had suddenly, for some unfathomable reason of his own, gone about and stood southward. Whither he was bound could only be guessed, but Calder’s orders were to follow the French wherever they might go, and he made for the Straits of Gibraltar under all sail.
Did he pass over a certain spot, some ninety miles north-west of Cape Finisterre, where a mass of frigate wreckage and splinters and jagged chips was floating about—like the ring of fluttered feathers that one sometimes sees at the corner of a wood on an autumn afternoon telling how a sparrow-hawk has passed that way? That flotsam off Finisterre, could it have spoken, would have told a tale; the story of the incident on which the campaign of Trafalgar hinged:—why Admiral Villeneuve had gone south instead of north.89
Off Cadiz Calder found Collingwood with half a dozen ships, and learned that the French were refitting in that port. Collingwood had had the narrowest of narrow escapes of being cut off and overpowered by the enemy’s sudden appearance off Cadiz,90 but he had cleverly got out of their way in the nick of time, and was now ‘observing’ them, making believe by sham signals every day that he was in touch with a large British fleet in the offing. Collingwood as the senior officer took Calder under his orders, and the united forces continued to watch Cadiz until at the end of September Lord Nelson himself arrived from England to take the supreme command.
For three weeks, as we all know, Nelson kept watch and ward over the enemy in Cadiz, until on the morning of Saturday the 19th of October his look-out frigates off the mouth of Cadiz harbour at last made the longed-for signal that the combined fleet was coming out of port.
They began to come out between seven and eight o’clock on Saturday morning, and from that time until the two fleets were in presence of each other off Cape Trafalgar on Monday morning, every move the enemy made was signalled to Nelson, lying out of sight from Cadiz, off Cape St Mary, by flag signals passed along a chain of ships in the day-time, and with rockets and blue lights and the firing of guns at night. ‘For two days,’ writes Midshipman Hercules Robinson of the frigate Euryalus, Captain Blackwood’s ship, in charge of the look-out squadron, ‘there was not a movement that we did not communicate, till I thought that Blackwood, who gave the orders, and Bruce our signal mid, and Soper our signal man who executed them, must have died of it; and when we had brought the two fleets fairly together we took our place between the two lines of lights, as a cab might in Regent Street, the watch was called and Blackwood turned in quietly to wait for the morning.’91 So close to the enemy did the Euryalus keep all Sunday night that, in the words of one of the men on board (a marine named Pearce) in a letter home, ‘their lights looked like a street well lighted up.’
Monday was Trafalgar Day. The enemy when first sighted from the British Fleet at daybreak were about eleven or twelve miles off, ‘a forest of masts to leeward,’ as one officer described them, standing along the coast towards the Straits of Gibraltar. Nelson at once headed eastward, straight for them:—’ere it was well light the signals were flying through the fleet to bear up and form the order of sailing in two columns.’ Then, immediately after that, up went the flags ‘Prepare for battle,’ Signal No. 13, and in response throughout the fleet, the drums on board every ship at once struck up the stirring old war-beat of the Navy, ‘Hearts of Oak’—
Come cheer up, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer,
To add something more to this wonderful year.
By seven o’clock every ship in the fleet had been cleared for action and all were ready for the enemy. A quarter of an hour was sufficient to clear for action on board a smart ship in ‘Eighteen hundred and War time,’ as our grandfathers called the days when the ‘Fighting’ Téméraire was at sea.
So admirably had Nelson organised his fleet and arranged things beforehand that three signals were all that he needed to make to set the day’s work in train. At twenty minutes to seven the Victory signalled—‘Form the order of sailing in two columns.’ Then, a moment later, up went ‘No. 13,’—the fighting flags—two flags, the upper one comprising three horizontal bands, yellow, red, yellow; the lower, three vertical bands, blue, white, blue—‘Prepare for battle.’ Ten minutes later another signal went up—‘Bear up and sail large on the course steered by the Admiral.’ The whole fleet on that headed directly for the enemy under all sail. These three signals were all that were necessary for the tactics of the battle, and all that Nelson made. What other signals were made from the Victory during the day, until after the fight had been won, dealt with subsidiary points and were merely incidental.
Here is the opening entry for the day in the Téméraire’s log. ‘At daylight saw the enemy’s fleet in the S.E. Cleared ship for action and made all sail. Light airs. Standing for the enemy.’
At eight o’clock all hands throughout the fleet were piped to breakfast. ‘The officers,’ we are told by one of them, ‘now met at breakfast, and though each seemed to exult in the hope of a glorious termination to the contest so near at hand, a fearful presage was experienced that all would not again unite at that festive board.’ More than one seemed ‘particularly impressed with a persuasion that he would not survive the day.... The sound of the drum, however, soon put an end to our meditations; and, after a hasty, and, alas, a final farewell to some, we repaired to our respective posts.’92
All on board now went to quarters, to their stations for the battle; the cooks’ fires were put out, and the magazines opened and powder sent up to the guns.
At nine o’clock the two fleets were about six miles apart. It was a gloriously fine morning, with the sky almost cloudless. A light breeze blew from the north-west, before which, with every sail set, the fleet bore down towards the enemy, the ships lifting on the swell as the long surging rollers from the ocean bore them forward.
At this point we may for one moment glance across at the enemy and see how they on their side have been faring. With the Combined Fleet,93 as it happened, the situation was by no means promising. The coming event was already casting its shadow before. Things had already begun to shape themselves awkwardly. Admiral Villeneuve had found it advisable to go about, and the Combined Franco-Spanish Fleet was now standing northward, heading back towards Cadiz, and forming into line of battle as they went along. The sight of the British fleet that morning had been an unpleasant surprise for Admiral Villeneuve. His look-out ships on the previous evening had reported the British fleet to him as not more than eighteen sail of the line, and to leeward. There were now in sight,—he could see them with his own eyes—upwards of ten sail of the line, including several three-deckers, more than that. Also—what weighed even more with Admiral Villeneuve—they were to windward of him. That meant that a stronger force than Villeneuve cared to meet was within striking distance of him and had the weather gage. Whether he went on or whether he went back, he would have to fight. He had cast the die. He had crossed the Rubicon.
’Twas vain to seek retreat and vain to fear,
Himself had challenged and the foe drew near.
As the best thing, if not indeed the only thing he could do in the circumstances, he decided to turn back and make for Cadiz. If he could not avoid a battle, he trusted to be able to get sufficiently near Cadiz to have the port open to him after the battle, for his damaged ships or as a place of general refuge should things go wrong.
With such thoughts in his mind, Villeneuve, just about the time that Nelson was sitting down to breakfast, issued orders for the Combined Fleet to go about, every ship independently, and form in line of battle on the port tack, with half a cable interval between ships. They were still in the middle of the manœuvre at nine o’clock. It was not till after ten o’clock that anything approaching the line of battle as ordered had been formed, and then hardly half-a-dozen ships were in station. All the enemy’s efforts, at the end of two hours, resulted in the formation of a crescent or bow-shaped array of ships, sagging in the centre away to leeward like a slack cord, with the ships distributed irregularly along its length, here in single file and with wide gaps between, there in two’s and three’s. As things turned out this malformation proved ideal for the occasion; but it was entirely by chance.
It has been said, indeed, that Admiral Villeneuve had already begun to anticipate defeat. As he took in the grouping and disposition of the British fleet, the double column of attack and how the leaders were pointing, there broke from his lips, we are told, an exclamation of blank dismay. Before a shot was fired Villeneuve had already admitted himself beaten. There was no precedent known to him for a battle formation such as Nelson was adopting.94 There was nothing like it in Paul Hoste, nothing like it in the pages of De Morogues or Ramatuelle. No text-book could help him, and to improvise a new order of battle for himself on the spur of the moment was beyond Admiral Villeneuve’s capacity. Practically he could only await events and meet an absolutely new form of attack, specially devised for the occasion by the greatest master of the art of naval war that ever lived, with an order of battle that was not new in the days of the Grand Monarque, with tactics such as Tourville had employed at La Hogue. It was like the Prussian General Rüchel at Jena opposing Napoleon with the tactics of Frederick at Kolin; attempting to foil Ney and Murat by giving the order ‘Right shoulders up.’
There were on the Franco-Spanish side thirty-three ships (eighteen French and fifteen Spanish); in the British fleet twenty-seven. Nelson’s plan of battle at the outset, as we shall presently see, reversed the odds and turned them into odds in his own favour, of twenty-seven against twenty-three. That is, the odds reckoned numerically, by counting ships. The average British ship of the line in 1805 could fire three broadsides while a French ship was firing two, which vastly increased the odds in Nelson’s favour. The British fleet came on in two columns; one (Nelson’s own) comprising twelve ships; the other (Collingwood’s column) of fifteen. Nelson’s plan of battle was for Collingwood to break the enemy’s line at about a third of its length from the rear, and hold fast in close action the ships cut off. He himself, after that, would break through the remaining two-thirds of the Franco-Spanish line midway, and fall on the enemy’s centre, joining hands with Collingwood. With the wind as it then was, a little to the north of west, the ten ships of the enemy’s van squadron would be cut off by these tactics and thrust to leeward, out of the battle. They would have to work up round laboriously against the wind before they could get to the aid of their consorts, a business that must take a considerable time. Meanwhile the whole force of the British fleet would have been brought to bear on two-thirds of the enemy with, as Nelson confidently trusted, decisive results.
Throughout the British fleet the men were in the highest spirits, eager and ready for the fray, and at the same time cool and confident. ‘As we neared the French fleet,’ an officer in the Ajax relates,95 ‘I was sent below with orders, and was much struck with the preparations made by the bluejackets, the majority of whom were stripped to the waist; a handkerchief was tightly bound round their heads and over the ears, to deaden the noise of the cannon, many men being deaf for days after an action. The men were variously occupied; some were sharpening their cutlasses, others polishing the guns, as though an inspection were about to take place instead of a mortal combat, whilst three or four, as if in mere bravado, were dancing a horn-pipe; but all seemed deeply anxious to come to close quarters with the enemy. Occasionally they would look out of the ports, and speculate as to the various ships of the enemy, many of which had been on former occasions engaged by our vessels.’ Elsewhere, we are told, the men kept pointing out various ships in the Franco-Spanish line, as seen through the open ports, and calling to one another, ‘What a fine sight them ships will make at Spithead!’ Particularly keen was every man that his ship should if possible get alongside the huge Spanish four-decker which all could see, near the centre of the enemy’s fleet, the Santisima Trinidad. On board the Bellerophon, one of Collingwood’s leading ships, the men at quarters on the main deck chalked ‘Billy Ruff’n, Victory or Death’ on their guns.96
How keen was the rivalry among the ships at the head of Nelson’s line, as the morning advanced, is shown by two incidents in which the Neptune—a 98-gun three-decker like the Téméraire, the ship next in the line to her—and the Téméraire herself, both figured.
The Téméraire had the post of honour in Nelson’s line, that of ‘second,’ or chief supporter to the Victory, but the Neptune had gradually drawn up level with her. Not content with that, the Neptune began to edge past the Téméraire, until, forging ahead, she had come up alongside the flagship herself. Indeed, it appeared as though she was ambitious of passing ahead of the Victory, and leading Nelson into the battle. The Admiral himself stopped her. Nelson at the moment that the Neptune began to draw up level with the Victory, happened to be in the stern gallery leading out of his cabin, observing how the rear ships of the fleet were coming on. He saw what was taking place, and at once hailed the Neptune. ‘Neptune there,’ he called out in a sharp, rasping tone, ‘take in your stu’ns’ls and drop astarn. I shall break the line myself!’97 The Neptune had to comply forthwith, and on her falling back the Téméraire pushed up and resumed her allotted berth as the ship next to the Victory.
Then came the incident that specially concerned the Téméraire. A little time after the Neptune had resumed her station the Téméraire was herself hailed from the Victory and ordered to pass the flagship and lead the line. Captain Blackwood of the Euryalus, who with the other frigate captains was on board the flagship, in his anxiety for Nelson’s personal safety that day, on having his first suggestion that Nelson should direct the battle from on board the Euryalus set aside by the admiral, next suggested that the Téméraire should be allowed to lead the Victory into battle, to help in drawing off some of the enemy’s fire. The enemy’s fire, urged Blackwood, would be certain to fall with exceptional severity on the leader of the line, particularly when the leading ship was so easily recognisable a vessel as the British flagship. Nelson assented—or seemed to assent. ‘Oh yes,’ the admiral answered, with a significant smile and giving a look towards Captain Hardy, ‘let her go ahead—if she can!’ Blackwood went aft and himself hailed the Téméraire to move up, and she was also signalled to do so.
The hail was heard. Blackwood had a voice about which a number of good stories used to be told in the Navy. ‘It could,’ one of his officers once said, ‘carry half a mile.’
At once the Téméraire made every effort to press forward. She was, as the sailors said, ‘flying light’ that day; having been away from port for some time she was carrying less dead-weight than usual, most of her sea-stores and heavy casks of beef and water having been used up. Fast sailer as the Victory was—she was admittedly the fastest three-decker in all the Royal Navy—the Téméraire before long began to close on the flagship and overlap her, by degrees working up closer to the Victory, and finally racing her side by side, almost abreast. It was a grand moment for Captain Harvey and his gallant Téméraires. But the goal was not yet won.
Nelson’s mood had yet to be taken into account, and Nelson was in no humour to see his flagship passed. No ship in the world should give the Victory a lead on the day of battle. As the Téméraire sheered alongside, the admiral stepped up briskly to the Victory’s poop and from there hailed across in a curt tone to the quarter-deck of the Téméraire. Speaking with a strong nasal twang, in his Norfolk accent, as we are told, he called over: ‘I’ll thank you, Captain Harvey, to keep your proper station, which is astarn of the Victory!’
The Téméraire had to drop back, exactly as the Neptune had previously had to do, and content herself with following in the Victory’s wake. She closed up astern and kept so near that her jib-boom, in Captain Harvey’s own words, ‘almost touched the stern of the Victory.’98
The same spirit of eager anxiety to get early into battle prevailed everywhere, coupled with the utmost friendliness and good-comradeship. The Tonnant, the second ship in Collingwood’s line, was ordered in the course of the morning to give up the place of honour to the faster Belleisle. As the Belleisle was passing her. Captain Tyler of the Tonnant on a carronade slide and called across to the other captain (Hargood): ‘A glorious day for old England: we shall have one a-piece before night!’ A moment later the Tonnant’s band, by way of greeting to the Belleisle, began to play ‘Britons Strike Home.’99
Such was the spirit in which Nelson’s Captains went into battle at Trafalgar as the hour for the opening of the fight drew on.
There is, as it happens, no note in the Téméraire’s log of Nelson’s famous signal, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’; but it is on record that it was received by Signal Midshipman Eaton, who acknowledged it to the Victory. We know from Captain Blackwood, who was with the Admiral at the time, how it was received by all the ships near by with ‘a shout of answering acclamation,’ and the Téméraire was the nearest ship of all to the Victory at that moment. After the battle the Téméraire’s officers had the words engraved on a brass plate which was let into the quarter-deck in front of the steering wheel, where it remained till the ship came to her end.
At noon, almost to the minute, the first shot was fired—by the enemy. It came from a French ship lying nearly opposite the head of Collingwood’s line, the Fougueux. It was aimed at the Royal Sovereign—to try the range. The shot went home, and at once other French and Spanish ships near by took up the firing. The Royal Sovereign was about 400 yards off at the moment, about three-quarters gunshot.
At the same time the enemy all along their line hoisted their colours, the Spaniards in addition hanging up large wooden crosses at their gaffs. Why they did so has never been explained. Some of the Spanish captains had held special religious services on board their ships at an earlier hour that morning,100 but it is not known that that had any connection with the display of the crosses.
A midshipman fired the first shot on the British side at Trafalgar—by accident. It came from the Bellerophon. To the surprise of the whole fleet, as they were nearing the enemy a spurt of smoke flew out from the side of the Bellerophon followed by the boom of a single gun. It was, according to the Spartiate’s log—the Bellerophon herself does not record it—just as Nelson’s great message was going up. On board every other ship they were holding their hands: the officers of the batteries had orders to wait until their ship was in the act of passing through the enemy. A boy midshipman of the Bellerophon tripped, or caught his foot, in the loose end of a gun-lock lanyard and let off one of the ship’s 32-pounders. His name is not on record, nor what they did to him. The shot had the unfortunate effect of drawing the enemy’s attention specially to the Bellerophon, and as they got the ship’s range a little later they turned their guns on her and pounded at her heavily, under the impression that the gun had been meant as a signal, and that some officer of distinction was on board that particular ship.
Collingwood opened the battle on the British side and first of all broke the enemy’s line at Trafalgar, as all the world knows. All the world knows also how he did it. The Royal Sovereign’s first broadside, as she broke through immediately astern of the Spanish flagship Santa Ana, struck down 400 men and dismounted fourteen guns. ‘Il rompait todos,’ it smashed down everything—as a Spanish officer on board the Santa Ana afterwards wrote. ‘What sheep,’—asked in broken English the Spanish officer who came on board Collingwood’s flagship on the surrender of the Santa Ana to give up his sword on behalf of the wounded Vice-Admiral Alava,—‘What sheep is dis?’ He was told. ‘Royal Sovereign!’ the Spaniard exclaimed, ‘Madre de Dios! she should be named de Royal Devil!’
The ships immediately facing Nelson as he advanced began their firing a few minutes after the others, the Victory and Téméraire and the leading ships of that column being farther off from the enemy. The Bucentaure, an 80-gun ship, on board which Admiral Villeneuve was, led off here.
Of the opening scene on the enemy’s side at that point, we have a vivid narrative from a French officer—Captain Lucas of the Redoutable, a ship destined to fill a large part in the Téméraire’s story.101 ‘At half-past eleven,’ says Captain Lucas,—giving the time, as it would appear, according to his own watch, which was slow,—‘the fleet hoisted its colours, and those of the Redoutable were done in an imposing manner, the drums and fifes playing, and the soldiers102 presenting arms as the flag was hoisted. The enemy’s column, which was directed against our fleet, was now on the port side, and the flagship Bucentaure began firing. I ordered a number of the chief gunners to mount to the forecastle and told them to notice how many of our ships fired badly. They found that all their shots carried too low. I then ordered them to aim at dismasting, and above all to aim well. At a quarter to twelve the Redoutable opened fire with a shot from the first gun-division which cut through the foretopsail yard of the Victory, causing it to lie over the foremast, whilst shouts of joy resounded all over the ship.’
Lord Nelson held his fire. No notice was taken of the firing of the French and Spaniards, except that, in response to the enemy’s opening shots, the whole British fleet simultaneously hoisted their colours. Nelson showed a Vice-Admiral of the White’s flag at the fore in the Victory; Collingwood the flag of a Vice-Admiral of the Blue at the fore in the Royal Sovereign; Lord Northesk, the third in command, a Rear-Admiral of the White’s flag at the mizen of the Britannia. All the ships in both divisions displayed the White Ensign at the peak, and, by Nelson’s particular order, to ensure that there should be no firing into friends in the smoke and confusion of battle, and in case colours got shot away, every ship flew at least two other British flags besides their ensigns: Jacks or Union flags, one on the foretopmast stay and one on the main-topmast stay. Some ships showed more; the Victory, for instance, flew five British flags; the Orion flew (including her ensign) four.
A young officer of the Neptune, the ship next astern to the Téméraire, Midshipman Badcock, thus describes what things were like near him about this time. ‘Lord Nelson’s van was strong: three three-deckers—Victory, Téméraire, Neptune—and four seventy-fours, their jib-booms nearly over the others’ taffrails, the bands playing “God Save the King,” “Rule, Britannia,” and “Britons Strike Home”; the crews stationed on the forecastle of the different ships, cheering the ship ahead of them when the enemy began to fire, sent those feelings to our hearts that ensured victory.’103 ‘The Téméraire at this moment,’ Captain Harvey himself says, in a letter to his wife after the battle, ‘almost touched the stern of the Victory, which station she had taken about a quarter of an hour previous to the enemy having commenced their fire upon the Victory.’
The Téméraire’s log thus describes the opening of the battle:—
P.M. Variable light winds. Running down with lower topmast and topgallant studding sails set, on the larboard side, within a ship’s length of the Victory, steering for the fourteenth ship of the enemy’s line from the van. Quarter past noon, cut away the studding sails and hauled to the wind. At 18 minutes past noon the enemy began to fire. At 25 minutes past noon the Victory opened her fire. Immediately put our helm a-port to steer clear of the Victory, and opened our fire on the Santisima Trinidad and two ships ahead of her, when the action became general.
Nelson broke through immediately astern of the French Bucentaure, the ship on board which he had himself made up his mind, from her position, Villeneuve would most likely be found. For some unknown reason the French admiral’s flag was not flying that day. Nelson, however, as they advanced, had kept the Victory’s bowsprit pointing for the Santisima Trinidad. Something instinctively told him that he should find the enemy’s Commander-in-Chief on board one of the two ships immediately astern of the big Spanish four-decker, probably in the ship next astern. He was right. Villeneuve was on board that ship; the next astern to the Santisima Trinidad, the Bucentaure.
As the Victory steered through the enemy’s line the Téméraire put her helm over to port and drew out from her leader’s wake. She had to find a passage through the enemy for herself. It was not easy. Immediately ahead of her the French Redoutable, a seventy-four, the ship following the Bucentaure, barred the way. The Téméraire for some little time drifted along slowly. She had received serious damage aloft to sails and rigging during the previous half-hour as she and the Victory were nearing the enemy under fire, and the breeze was dropping lighter every minute. She opened a brisk cannonade on the Redoutable and on the French Neptune, a large 80-gun ship that came next astern of her.
The Redoutable’s fire shot away the head of the Téméraire’s mizen-topmast. She held on, however, standing to the south-east and outside the enemy’s line, until at length she bore up to avoid being raked by the Neptune and to go through the line. There was scarcely any wind at all now, and the smoke hung heavily all round. Slowly the Téméraire forged her way ahead, groping her course forward in some little uncertainty as to her own whereabouts. As she passed through the line, she unavoidably gave a chance to the French Neptune, which ship, getting her port broadside to bear on the Téméraire’s starboard bow, attacked her fiercely. The Neptune shot away the Téméraire’s main-topmast and foreyard, and crippled the foremast and bowsprit, besides causing other damage which rendered the Téméraire almost unmanageable. In the dense smoke all round her officers hardly knew for the moment where they had got to. ‘We were engaged with the Santisima Trinidad and the other ships,’ wrote Captain Harvey in his letter home, ‘when for a minute or two I ceased my fire, fearing I might, from the thickness of the smoke, be firing into the Victory.’
Then for a brief space there was a rift in the smoke. It showed the Victory alongside a French two-decker (the Redoutable), and foul of her. The two ships were seen not far off and were drifting down directly on to the Téméraire. Every effort was made to move out of the way and keep clear, but in her disabled state it was impossible to get the Téméraire under control. Within the past few minutes, under the Neptune’s punishing fire, all three of the Téméraire’s topmasts had been shot away, her mizen yard had come down, the rudder head had been smashed off. All that could be done was to cannonade the Redoutable as she gradually drifted nearer until the actual collision came.
That took place just as Captain Lucas was about to make an attempt to board the Victory. His musketry from the tops seemed to have almost cleared the Victory’s upper decks of men, and, mad as was the idea of so settling with a British first-rate, and Lord Nelson’s flagship to boot, the captain of the Redoutable actually entertained it. A sweeping mitraille of grape from the 68-pounder carronade on the Victory’s forecastle, fired into the thick of the French boarders as they crowded on the gangways from below, did not daunt him, and he still persevered after the first rush had been checked by the impossibility of getting across the space between the bulwarks of the two ships. That difficulty Captain Lucas saw his way to meet. ‘I gave the order,’ he says, ‘to cut the supports of the main yard and to cause it to serve as a bridge. Midshipman Yon and four seamen sprang on board by means of the anchor of the Victory, and we observed that there was no one left in the batteries. At that moment, when our men were hastening to follow, the ship Téméraire, which had noticed that the Victory fought no longer, and that she would be captured without fail, came full sail on our starboard side, and we were subjected to the full fire of her artillery.’
It proved for the Redoutable, in the language of the prize-ring, a ‘knock-out’ blow. As the Téméraire came into collision with the Redoutable she fired her entire broadside, double-shotted, full into the French boarding-parties as they stood massed thickly and packed along the Redoutable’s upper decks from end to end. It meant instant annihilation. It was a massacre. The awful tornado of the Téméraire’s fire swept the Redoutable’s crowded decks clear of men, as a garden broom sweeps a path clear of autumn leaves. It struck down everything. At one blow it hurled into eternity nearly a third of the Redoutable’s whole crew. Midshipman Yon, we are told, disappeared, and was never seen again. Lieutenant Dupotet, at the head of the boarders, was struck down, mangled and dying. Captain Lucas himself received an ugly flesh wound—his first after seeing service in nine battles.
Speaking of the Téméraire’s onslaught Captain Lucas in his official report says: ‘It is impossible to describe the carnage produced by the murderous broadside of this ship; more than 200 of our brave men were killed or wounded; I was wounded also at the same time, but not sufficiently to prevent me staying at my post.’
The gallant captain of the Redoutable stayed at his post. He set his teeth and refused to admit that his ship had received her coup de grâce. In spite of his awful losses the gallant fellow still tried to make a show of fight. ‘I ordered the rest of the crew to place themselves promptly in the batteries and fire at the Téméraire the guns that her fire had not dismounted. This order was carried out.’ At the same time the Redoutable met the Téméraire, as she swung alongside, with a hail of bullets from the tops that almost cleared the upper deck of Captain Harvey’s ship, while the topmen also flung down hand grenades and fire-balls. The Redoutable’s topmen, indeed, flung the fire-balls about with criminal recklessness.104 They endangered their own ship. Some of the fire-balls falling short rebounded back on board the Redoutable and set the French ship herself on fire. One fell blazing on board the Téméraire and caused a fire below that nearly led to a catastrophe which threatened to involve Téméraire, Redoutable, and Victory alike in one common destruction. The pluck and presence of mind of the Téméraire’s master-at-arms, Mr. John Toohig, saved the after-magazine, and with it the ship. The fire-ball, as it was, caused a serious explosion and loss of life on the main deck. At the same time the Téméraire was set ablaze elsewhere, on the upper deck, by a fire that had been caused on board the Redoutable by one of her own fire-balls falling short, and had spread across to the Téméraire, and also to the Victory on the other side, but the flames in all three ships were fortunately got under before they had time to take serious hold.
The Téméraire’s captain very soon had something else to think of besides the Redoutable. Hardly had the Redoutable been lashed fast alongside than another enemy came on the scene, and one that was apparently approaching with the fixed intention of attacking the Téméraire at close quarters. The French Neptune was at the same time remaining near by, barely a ship’s length off, firing her hardest into the Téméraire.
The newcomer was the French Fougueux, the ship that had fired the first shot in the battle. She had already had a rough time of it elsewhere, but she was still full of fight, and with nearly 700 men on board, was likely to prove a dangerous foe to a ship situated as was the Téméraire at that moment. The Fougueux had been matelot d’arrière, or ‘second astern’ to the Spanish flagship Santa Ana, just as the Redoutable had been the Bucentaure’s second. In that capacity she had experienced some hard knocks at Collingwood’s hands, and then, after a brisk exchange of fire with the British Belleisle, as that ship followed Collingwood into the fight, she had had a sharp set-to with the Mars. Through all this the Fougueux had not come unscathed, but she was still a very formidable opponent for the Téméraire to tackle.
The Fougueux came on as though bent on rescuing the Redoutable. It did not look an impossible task. Both the Victory and the Téméraire showed signs of having undergone a very severe mauling, and there was the French Neptune near by, apparently quite fresh and ready to lend a hand, only waiting for an opportunity to join in the fray. The Téméraire particularly, looked in a bad way. Under the Neptune’s punishing fire, she had been reduced aloft to the appearance of a wreck. Her topmasts had gone, her foreyard was gone, her foremast was tottering, all her rigging was torn and tangled, her sails hung down in rags. Her ensign, too, had been shot away, or at least was down owing to the fall of the gaff; very few men were to be seen alive on her upper deck; not a shot came from her guns on the broadside facing the Fougueux.
Captain Baudoin, the captain of the Fougueux, seemed at first uncertain whether he would lie off to leeward, and with the Neptune’s help rake and cannonade the Téméraire into submission, or come to close quarters at once and board. The second alternative seemed to promise quicker results, and he adopted it. He made up his mind to bring the matter to an issue on the spot before other British ships could interfere, and carry the Téméraire by a coup de main. The few people he saw about on the Téméraire’s upper deck was one inducement to try boarding her. He could not know, of course, that Captain Harvey had ordered everybody who could possibly be spared to go below so as to avoid unnecessary loss of life from the Redoutable’s musketry. Another was that the Téméraire’s attention seemed to be wholly devoted to the Redoutable. Captain Baudoin put the Fougueux’s head directly for the Téméraire, and as they closed, the French ship’s shrouds quickly became black with men, cutlass in hand, while more swarmed on the forecastle and gangways cheering and shouting ‘À l’abordage! à l’abordage!’ So the Fougueux neared the Téméraire. For her part, as it befell, the Téméraire had for some time foreseen what was coming. She was by no means so incapable of meeting a new antagonist as she looked.
The Téméraire, as it happened, had not yet fired a single shot from her guns on the starboard broadside. She had her triple tier of 32-pounders and long 18’s ranged there all ready, all double-shotted and clear for action. To man these guns was quick work. Without checking the fire that the Téméraire was keeping up into the Redoutable and the Neptune, Lieutenant Kennedy, the first lieutenant, rapidly called away sufficient hands from the guns on the port side to man all the starboard batteries. Then the gallant officer and his men waited—the captain of each gun standing ready with arm raised and his firing lanyard out-stretched stiff as wire—all eagerly watching the coming on of the Fougueux. Not a sign that the guns were manned came from the Téméraire’s ports, as nearer and nearer the French seventy-four swept down on her. Now she was 200 yards off—now 150—now 100—now 80 yards! Confidently came the Fougueux on as to certain conquest, amid wild tempestuous shoutings of ‘A l’abordage!’ ‘Vive l’Empereur! Vive l’Empereur!’ The supreme moment came.
‘Téméraires—stand by—fire!’
Holding back until the yard-arms of the two ships all but touched, with a deafening thunder-burst that for the instant overpowered all other sounds of battle, the Téméraire’s whole starboard broadside went off at once, in one salvo, like one gigantic gun. A terrific crash re-echoed back, with yells and shrieks. There was no more shouting from the Fougueux. As the smoke drifted off, the Téméraire’s men looked and saw the enemy’s rigging and forecastle and decks swept clean and bare. The next minute, with her whole side practically beaten in, crushed in like an eggshell trampled under foot, the hapless seventy-four ran, blundering blindly, in hopeless confusion, right into the Téméraire.105
Like the Redoutable she was promptly lashed fast, and then—‘Boarders away!’ was the call. A master’s mate, a little middy, twenty seamen, six marines, followed close behind Lieutenant Kennedy as he clambered into the Fougueux’s main rigging, and thence down on to the Fougueux’s quarter-deck. One of the seamen with the boarding-party had a Union Jack rolled round his neck. ‘It’ll come handy perhaps,’ said the brave fellow as he followed his messmates over the side. There was a sharp tussle on the quarter-deck of the Fougueux, where Captain Baudoin, struck down by the Téméraire’s broadside, lay mortally wounded. Second-Captain Bazin hastily rallied seventy or eighty men, called up from below to meet the boarders, but the impetuous onset of the nine-and-twenty Téméraires carried everything before it despite the odds. The Fougueux’s second captain was cut down. A lieutenant who took his place was shot dead with a pistol bullet through the heart. The Frenchmen then gave way and broke and were driven off the quarter-deck pell-mell. Slashing and stabbing their way, without a single fresh man from the ship, in less than twelve minutes Lieutenant Kennedy’s party were masters of the Fougueux. They hustled the surrendered Frenchmen down into the hold, clapped the hatches on them, and then the Union Jack came in ‘handy’ to hoist over the tricolour on the Fougueux’ ensign staff.
So the Redoutable’s would-be rescuer was added to the row of four ships, all fast to one another side by side, the Victory, Redoutable, Téméraire, and Fougueux.
Relieved from the hostile presence of the Fougueux, the Téméraire turned her attention to finishing off the Redoutable, now plainly at her last gasp, though still unsubdued. Her guns were silenced, but musket shots still came from the tops. A few minutes later the Victory broke herself clear and steered away from the group. She boomed herself off, leaving Captain Harvey to receive in due course the submission of the Redoutable.
But even now Captain Lucas would not give up. ‘The Téméraire, to quote Captain Lucas’s own words once more, ‘hailed us to give ourselves up and not prolong a useless resistance. I ordered some soldiers near me to answer this summons by firing, which was done with alacrity.’ The end, though, was at last really at hand. Scarcely had the British flagship broken away than the Redoutable’s main and mizen masts came down. The main-mast crashed over the Téméraire’s poop, and in its fall formed a bridge from ship to ship, across which a party of the Téméraire’s officers and men, headed by the second lieutenant, John Wallace, promptly clambered. With more than 500 of his original crew of 600 odd hors de combat, dead or wounded, there was no opposition possible, and Captain Lucas had to yield up his sword.
No captain, perhaps, ever fought his ship better against overwhelming odds than Captain Lucas fought the Redoutable at Trafalgar. Napoleon had him specially exchanged as soon as possible, and sent for him to St. Cloud where, in the presence of the assembled État Major, he decorated him with his own hand with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.106 ‘Had my other captains,’ said the Emperor, ‘behaved as you did, the event of the battle would have been very different.’ There is an ironclad Redoutable in the French navy to-day which bears the name in remembrance of the gallant two-decker lost with honour at Trafalgar.
The Téméraire, however, had still one of her first foes left. The French Neptune was still dangerously near. She was lying where she had been from the first, pounding away steadily into the Téméraire from a short distance off, ‘willing to wound but still afraid to strike.’ It says little for the courage of the French captain that he had not ventured to force home an attack at close quarters, and less still for the gunnery of his men that it had not before this reduced the Téméraire to a sinking state. Not far off, also, there was, as the Téméraire’s log notes, ‘a Spanish two-decked ship... on the larboard bow or nearly ahead, who had raked us during great part of the action.’ On seeing the Victory move off, the French Neptune apparently took heart of grace. She now made as if she really meant at last to close with the Téméraire. It was not very brave of the Neptune, seeing how the Téméraire was situated, with five-sixths of her guns blocked in by the two prizes alongside. But all the same the Téméraire did her best to give the Neptune a warm reception. By clearing away the wreckage from aloft that overlay most of the Téméraire’s upper-deck guns, Captain Harvey was able to get some of these into action and keep the Neptune off. Then a few minutes later assistance arrived. The approach of the Leviathan, a British seventy-four, once more daunted the Neptune, and she sheered off and withdrew altogether from the scene.
After that came a well-earned breathing space for the Téméraire and her gallant crew, a brief half-hour’s pause that Captain Harvey and his men made use of in putting prize-crews in charge of the Redoutable and Fougueux, and doing what they could towards repairing their own damages and clearing away their wrecked top-hamper. The Sirius frigate during this spell, in response to a signal from Captain Harvey, took the Téméraire and her prizes in tow.
A note in the Téméraire’s log shows how intermixed some of the British ships had now got. ‘The Royal Sovereign,’ it says, ‘was a short distance to leeward, and the Colossus, dismasted, with one of the enemy’s two-deckers on board of her, who had struck, and appeared to be Spanish.’
In the half-hour that the Téméraire stood by, the battle passed through its crisis, although fighting went on fiercely at many points for another two hours yet. Before half-past two, six or seven of the enemy had given in and could be seen ‘lying with British ensigns displayed at the stern over tricolours or Spanish flags.’ By three o’clock nearly a third of the enemy’s fleet had either struck their colours or were on the point of striking them, and another third were hauling out of line and preparing to quit the battle and run for Cadiz. The Spanish flagship Santa Ana, with every mast down and her starboard side shattered to matchwood, had surrendered to the Royal Sovereign. The French flagship Bucentaure had hauled down her ensign and Admiral Villeneuve was a prisoner on board the British Mars.
The surrender of the Bucentaure—although perhaps it only comes incidentally into the Téméraire’s story—was one of the most dramatic events of Trafalgar. When the French flagship, beaten to a standstill, with her three masts shot down, one after the other within five minutes, was on the point of surrendering, Admiral Villeneuve ordered a boat to be lowered to take him on board another French ship. ‘Le Bucentaure,’ said Villeneuve as he gave the order, ‘à rempli sa tâche, la mienne n’est pas encore achevée.’107 But every one of the Bucentaure’s boats was found to have been smashed to pieces. Then Villeneuve’s flag-captain, Majendie, hurried aft and clambering into the wreckage of the ship’s stern gallery with his speaking-trumpet hailed the Santisima Trinidad to send a boat at once. There was no reply. The Trinidad was lying quite close to the Bucentaure at that moment, so close that only a very few yards separated Majendie from her as he hailed, but the tremendous thunder of the guns all round completely overpowered his voice. Nor did any one on board the Spanish ship see him. There was no means of attracting help from elsewhere. The Bucentaure had indeed done her work—and Villeneuve’s too. There was left now but one thing to do. The colours of the Bucentaure were hauled down to the nearest British ship,—a seventy-four named, by something of a coincidence, the Conqueror,—‘and a white handkerchief was waved from her in token of submission.’ Captain Israel Pellew was in command of the Conqueror. He was at the moment unable to spare Lieutenant Couch, his First Lieutenant, to whom in ordinary course the duty of boarding the prize would have fallen, and being unaware, from the absence throughout the battle of Villeneuve’s flag from the Bucentaure’s mast-head, that the enemy’s Commander-in-Chief had surrendered to him, he told Captain Atcherley of the Conqueror’s marines to go in the First Lieutenant’s place and take possession of the Bucentaure. Atcherley went off in a small boat with two seamen and a corporal and two marines. He was pulled alongside and clambered on board the prize, little dreaming whom he was going to meet and the reception in store for him. This is what then took place.
As Atcherley gained the Bucentaure’s upper-deck and the British officer’s red coat showed itself on the quarter-deck of the French flagship, four French officers of rank stepped forward all bowing and presenting their swords. One was a tall, thin, sad-faced man of about forty-two, in a long-tailed uniform coat with flat high collar and dark green corduroy breeches, gold-laced at the sides. It was Admiral Villeneuve himself. The second was a short, rotund, jolly-faced man, a typical boulevardier in appearance:—Flag-Captain Majendie.108 The third was Second-Captain Prigny of the Bucentaure; and the fourth a soldier resplendent in the full-dress uniform—somewhat besmirched by powder-smoke—of a Brigadier of the Grand Army, General de Contamine, the officer in charge of the four thousand troops that were serving on board the French Fleet that day.
‘To whom,’ asked Admiral Villeneuve in good English, ‘have I the honour of surrendering?’
‘To Captain Pellew of the Conqueror.’
‘I am glad to have struck to the fortunate Sir Edward Pellew.’
‘It is his brother, Sir,’ said Captain Atcherley.
‘His brother! What; are there two of them? Hélas!’
‘Fortune de guerre!’ said Captain Majendie with a shrug of his wide shoulders as he became a prisoner of war to the British Navy for the third time in his life. Prigny and De Contamine said nothing, as far as we know.
Captain Atcherley politely suggested that the swords of such high officers had better be handed to an officer of superior rank to himself—to Captain Pellew. He then went below to secure the magazines, passing between decks amid an awful scene of carnage and destruction. ‘The dead thrown back as they fell lay along the middle of the decks in heaps, and the shot passing through these had frightfully mangled the bodies.... More than four hundred had been killed and wounded, of whom an extraordinary proportion had lost their heads. A raking shot which entered in the lower deck had glanced along the beams and through the thickest of the people, and a French officer declared that this shot alone had killed or disabled nearly forty men.’109
Atcherley locked up the magazines and put the keys in his pocket, posted his two marines as sentries at the doors of the Admiral’s and flag-captain’s cabins, and then returning on deck, he conducted Villeneuve, Majendie, and Second-Captain Prigny down the side into his little boat which rowed off in search of the Conqueror. The ship, however, had ranged ahead to engage another enemy, and as her whereabouts could not be discovered in the smoke, the prisoners were temporarily placed on board the nearest British ship, which happened to be the Mars.
The battle, however, even though both the French Commander-in-Chief and the Spanish Second in Command110 and also the big Santisima Trinidad with the Spanish Third in Command,111 had surrendered, was not yet over. There were still a number of ships of the enemy that were yet apparently unbeaten, besides one group that had hardly fired a shot as yet.
At three o’clock, or a few minutes after that, the Téméraire’s men had again to stand to their guns. Fresh foes were seen approaching.
These were five of the ships of Villeneuve’s van squadron under Rear-Admiral Dumanoir. Admiral Villeneuve’s last signal had been to order Dumanoir’s squadron, which had been cut off by Nelson’s tactics and had so far not been engaged at all, to head round and come to the rescue of the centre and rear. There were originally ten ships under Dumanoir’s command, but five of them, after they came round, broke away, and edged off to leeward towards where Admiral Gravina (the Spanish Commander-in-Chief, now left by Villeneuve’s surrender the senior officer on the enemy’s side) was rallying some of the rear ships to try and escape into Cadiz. What befell these does not concern us.
Dumanoir’s remnant of five (four French ships and one Spaniard) stood along a little to windward of the ships engaged as far as where the Téméraire lay, making it appear as though they were coming down to attack. ‘At 3,’ says the Téméraire’s log, ‘observed five of the enemy in good order, starboard side. Sent the men from the quarter-deck guns to assist on the other decks. The Sirius made sail from us, when four of the enemy’s ships opened their fire on our starboard side; having but few guns clear of the prizes, cut them loose.’ ‘While they were about three-quarters of a mile to windward,’ says Captain Harvey describing what happened in his letter home, ‘they opened their guns upon the Téméraire and her prizes, and for some time I could return no guns; but when those we could fight with were brought to bear upon the enemy, the gentlemen thought proper to haul to a more respectable distance, and thus towards evening with me ended this most glorious action.’112 Dumanoir’s fire did little harm to the Téméraire herself. It mortally wounded one of her midshipmen who was on board the Redoutable, and cut away the Fougueux’ main and mizen masts,—the Fougueux had been cleared away from alongside the Téméraire a few moments previously, and allowed to swing athwart the Téméraire’s stern, end-on to Dumanoir’s ships as they passed by,—but that was practically all they did.
‘Half-past 4,’ says the Téméraire’s log, ‘ceased firing.’ The Téméraire had now played her part. It only remained to house and secure the guns.
The battle was over—although near by there were still some three or four of the enemy who had not yet gone through the formality of lowering their ensigns. They were feebly firing, though they could neither fight nor fly. All could see that the inevitable end could hardly be long deferred. The knife was already at the throats of the last of the destined victims of the day. The Téméraire’s last gun, as a fact, went at the same instant that Nelson, in the cockpit of the Victory, breathed his last.
Three-quarters of an hour later all resistance on the part of the enemy had ceased, and there was a silence on the sea. Trafalgar had been fought and won. Seventeen of the enemy had surrendered—eight French ships and nine Spaniards. One French ship, in addition, was on fire and her crew were being rescued by the boats of the nearest British ships. The remainder of the enemy had run out of the battle and were in full flight, some in one direction, some in another.
The scene all round at that moment, as it appeared from the Téméraire, was one that the last survivor of Trafalgar could hardly have forgotten to his dying day—
Nobly, nobly, Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died away,
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay,
Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face, Trafalgar lay.
Cape Trafalgar was sighted from off the deck, we are told, just as the battle was ending, and was made at about eight miles off. On either hand lay ships with shattered bulwarks and hulls gashed all over and riddled from the water-line upwards with gaping and splintered shot-holes, the yellow strakes between the ports seared and scorched by the back-blast from the guns and crusted over with half-burned powder. Some also had several of their ports knocked into one, or their port-lids unhung or wrenched away; others had their figure-heads clean gone, and their bowsprits smashed off short; others, in addition, had their stern and quarter galleries beaten in; and there were ugly smears and stains down the sides of all where the scuppers opened overboard. No fewer than nine ships were lying entirely dismantled—‘ras comme des pontons,’ as a Frenchman put it. In these everything on deck above the bulwarks was gone, shorn roughly off—rigging, spars, masts—everything. A short stump, only a few feet high, remained in one or two of the ships to show where a tall mast had that morning stood—that was all. All else had disappeared—smashed down, shot by the board and lying over the sides amid the tangled confusion of broken spars, torn rigging, and ragged sails. Eight of the dismasted ships were trophies of the battle, French or Spanish prizes—the Bucentaure and the Santisima Trinidad among them. The ninth was a British ship, the cruelly battered Belleisle, which had undergone a terrific mauling. The burning ship was the French Achille, which lay not far off—a mass of flames from end to end. She had been set on fire by accident in the last hour of the battle, and was now blazing fiercely from stem to stern, sending off heavy volumes of dense black smoke into the clear evening air, as the hapless vessel lay burning to the water’s edge, or until the flames should reach the magazine. Over yonder a group of British ships, several with topmasts and yards gone, were closing on a big three-decker that had only her foremast left standing, Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign. Nearer, the battered ships of Nelson’s column formed another group, collecting round the Victory. Far to the north-west, towards Cadiz, could be seen the sails of eleven ships that were escaping with Gravina. Among these fugitives was the Téméraire’s first antagonist, the French Neptune, which, by carefully avoiding every attempt to bring her to close action, had got through the battle with a loss of only 13 men killed and 37 wounded. Black dots against the western sky, now ablaze in all the wild glory of a stormy October sunset, Dumanoir’s flying ships could be seen—four in number—standing away into the Atlantic. The fifth ship of the group, the Spanish Neptuno, had been cut off and taken as the battle closed by the British Minotaur and Spartiate.
All the while during the final scene Nelson’s flag remained flying at the Victory’s mast-head—although the Admiral had for nearly an hour now been lying dead. Those on board were, perhaps, loth to lower it before they must. In accordance with one of the old fighting instructions of the navy, the commander-in-chief’s ship in action kept her Admiral’s flag flying in all circumstances until the battle was over, whatever might have happened to the Admiral meantime. Whether he was disabled or whether he was killed, the flag must still fly to the end of the action in its accustomed place. As a fact, at Trafalgar, Flag-Captain Hardy of the Victory had had the entire handling of the British fleet from the moment that Nelson was struck down until the last shot had been fired. His descendants treasure to this day the silver pencil-case that Hardy ‘used to write down signals during the battle of Trafalgar, with the marks of his teeth on it made in moments of excitement!’ It was shown at the Naval Exhibition at Chelsea in 1891, one newspaper speaking of it as ‘something like a relic!’ Nelson’s flag flew till sunset, and, in consequence, except the Victory and the Royal Sovereign, to which Captain Hardy, of course, had sent the news specially, and Captain Blackwood’s Euryalus, barely half a dozen ships of the fleet were aware of Nelson’s death that night; or even that he had been wounded. In the Téméraire herself the news was not known, owing to the dispersal of the fleet caused by the stormy weather of the three following days, until the 24th, when Captain Harvey first learnt what had happened by a casual signal from the Defiance.
This is what was said on the spot of the way the Téméraire had done her work. ‘I congratulate you most sincerely,’ wrote Collingwood to Captain Harvey, on the 28th of October, ‘on the noble and distinguished part the Téméraire took in the battle; nothing could be finer; I have not words in which I can sufficiently express my admiration of it.’113 This from a man so temperate in his language as Collingwood was at all times was indeed high praise.
Her day’s work at Trafalgar cost the Téméraire in casualties exactly 123 killed and wounded; or as Captain Harvey put it: ‘Killed, 47; badly wounded, 31; slightly wounded, 45—in all, 123.’ Captain Busigny and Lieutenant Kingston of the Marines, one midshipman (John Pitts) and Mr Oades, the carpenter, were the officers killed; one lieutenant of the Royal Navy, the surviving lieutenant of Marines, a master’s-mate and a midshipman, with the Téméraire’s boatswain, were the officers wounded. Forty-three more of the Téméraire’s men were drowned on board the Fougueux and the Redoutable, in the storm after the battle.
As everybody knows, all Nelson’s Trafalgar prizes except four perished in the storm after the battle, or were set on fire or scuttled. Whose fault it was, or how it came about that Nelson’s dying order to anchor immediately the battle was over, which would probably have preserved all the prizes, was set aside, we need not discuss. Both the Téméraire’s prizes were among the ships that were lost—the Fougueux being wrecked a few miles south of Cadiz and the Redoutable foundering in deep water. The Redoutable foundered during the night of the 22nd, carrying down with her 13 of the Téméraire’s men. She was in tow of the Swiftsure, which had relieved the Téméraire of her, when, about five on the previous afternoon, she made signals of distress. The straining of the dismasted hull as it pitched and rolled in the heavy seas had reopened the shot-holes below the water-line and the ship was filling. The Swiftsure hove-to and lowered her boats, which in two trips brought off safely many of the prisoners and the wounded, and part of the Téméraire’s prize crew. Then, however, the attempt had to be given up. ‘The weather was so bad and the sea so high,’ that, in the words of the Swiftsure’s log, ‘it was impossible for the boats to pass.’ They were still, though, keeping the Redoutable in tow, hoping she might live out the night, when, at half-past ten, all of a sudden, the prize foundered by the stern. The sinking was so sudden at the last that the Swiftsure’s men had no time to cast loose the tow-rope and had to chop it in two with axes. During the night a few of the Redoutable’s men were picked up floating on rafts that they had made, but upwards of 190 hapless fellows went down in the ship.
The Téméraire herself had a bad time of it in the storm. All Tuesday, the 22nd, the Sirius kept her in tow, but it was so rough that little could be done on board towards refitting the ship or attempting to rig jury-masts or repair damages. On the 23rd the Sirius was called off by signal to recover prizes adrift which the sortie that the refugee ships in Cadiz attempted that day was threatening. The Africa was told off to take the Téméraire in tow, but the storm came on worse than ever during the afternoon, and the Africa, whose badly damaged masts were threatening to roll over the side every minute, could do nothing but stand by. ‘The state of the Téméraire is so bad,’ wrote Captain Harvey, that night, ‘that we have been in constant apprehension of our lives, every sail and yard having been destroyed, and nothing but the lower masts left standing, the rudder-head almost shot off and is since gone, and lower masts all shot through and through in many places.’
The Téméraire, however, managed to come through all safely, and she again held her own by herself throughout the 24th and all the next day. Unaided, she brought up in the end in safety off San Lucar, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir some 25 miles north of Cadiz, at seven on the morning of the 25th. Here the men stopped shot-holes above water, cleared away wreckage and completed the knotting and splicing of the damaged rigging and cleaning up of the ship, and got up jury-masts and lower yards:—five days’ hard work. On the 30th of October, the Defiance took the Téméraire in tow for Gibraltar, where the ship let go anchor on the afternoon of the 2nd of November, twelve days after Trafalgar.
At Gibraltar the Téméraire was patched up and refitted sufficiently to enable her to proceed to England under sail. The Victory had arrived four days before, and was lying at anchor with Nelson’s flag and her ensign at half-mast, as were the other ships of the fleet, upwards of a dozen, that had as yet come in. Four days afterwards the Euryalus, from which Admiral Collingwood had removed into the Queen, sailed for England, carrying on board Collingwood’s completed Trafalgar despatch,114 the captured French and Spanish ensigns (to be hung up in St. Paul’s and left there to perish through neglect), and Admiral Villeneuve himself, going to meet his doom. Within six months the hapless French Admiral was dead—by his own hand. The story, so long believed in England, that Admiral Villeneuve’s death was another foul murder to be charged against Napoleon has every probability against it. Paroled on his arrival at Spithead, and exchanged on the usual terms, Villeneuve had landed at Morlaix in Brittany, and was on his way to report himself in Paris, when one evening a sealed letter from the Minister of Marine was handed to him. Next morning he was found in his bedroom at the inn where he had put up, stabbed to the heart. A letter taking leave of his wife was found in the room. He was buried that night without any honours.
Poor Villeneuve! It was a pitiful and hapless closing to a career that had opened with such bright promise for a certain young garde de la Marine on the quarter-deck of De Suffren’s Héros115; a sad, unworthy ending for one in whose veins ran the blood of eight-and-twenty knights of St. Louis, St. Esprit, and St. Michel; for one who in his own right was of the highest of the old noblesse of Royal France, for a member of a House that had given one of the most famous of Grand Masters to the Order, and a Saint and ten Bishops to the Church.116 Poor Villeneuve! —where moulders his unhappy dust? The summer visitor from England, at the price of a cheap ticket, may see where the poor remains of the vanquished of Trafalgar rest to-day—if, that is, he can find the place. Beneath no storied monument is it, among his country’s greater dead; not in the vault of the Villeneuves where his high-born kinsmen sleep:—not there. In a forgotten spot in the old burial-ground at distant Rennes, a Provençal he among stranger Bretons, the most luckless of his line lies there in a suicide’s desolate grave. And it is all the more pitiful too, when one thinks of our own Trafalgar chiefs laid to their rest together in honour in St. Paul’s. Side by side in the vaulted crypt beneath the Cathedral dome rest our three Trafalgar admirals in honour evermore. Brothers-in-arms in life, like brothers in death they lie; till, pealing out on land and sea, the dread Archangel’s trump shall sound their final call to quarters. Poor Villeneuve! What a contrast!
The Téméraire followed the Euryalus to England some days later. She brought on board, like the other returning ships, three hundred French prisoners, together with, as her special passenger. Captain Infernet of the French Intrépide. She arrived at Spithead on the 5th of December, the day after the Victory, with Nelson’s remains on board, had anchored at St. Helens, and on the 20th of December went up Portsmouth Harbour to go into dock. It so chanced that an artist, John Christian Schetky, afterwards marine painter to King George the Fourth, William the Fourth, and Queen Victoria, was at Portsmouth on the day the Téméraire came in, cheered to the echo on all sides by crowds on the Platform and Point batteries and by every boat and ship that she passed. Sketchbook in hand Mr. Schetky made good use of his opportunity.
Captain Harvey arrived in England to find himself a Rear-Admiral, one of the officers specially promoted in honour of Trafalgar, included in the promotion caused by the creation of the rank of Admiral of the Red. He handed over the Téméraire to Acting-Captain Larmour who, six weeks later, paid the ship off for a refit and repair in Portsmouth dockyard which lasted several months. Admiral Harvey was one of the pall-bearers at Nelson’s funeral. When in January 1815 he became a K.C.B. he was granted as a special motto above his crest, the name Téméraire, together with as supporters to the Harvey family arms,—a triton with a laurel-wreathed trident, and a sea-horse with a naval crown inscribed ‘Trafalgar,’ bearing underneath all as an additional motto the legend Redoutable et Fougueux.
How for six years after Trafalgar the Téméraire did her duty before the enemy, at one time helping to keep Marshal Soult out of Cadiz, at another taking her part in holding in check the powerful new fleet that Napoleon created in Toulon to avenge Trafalgar on some future day that never came—all that is another story. Her last shotted guns were fired to silence a French battery in Hyères Bay, near the entrance to Toulon harbour, which rashly opened fire on the Téméraire one day. The Téméraire closed with the battery and gave the French gunners one tremendous broadside that practically cleared the battery out. Not a shot came from it again. The war story of the Téméraire ends six months later with her final paying off at Plymouth.
There only remained for the Téméraire, after that, to complete her allotted span and await the striking of the inevitable hour.
For age will rust the brightest blade,
And time will break the stoutest bow;
Was never wight so starkly made,
But age and time will bring him low.
She outlasted, indeed, her old captain at Trafalgar. In 1836, six years after Sir Eliab Harvey had been gathered to his fathers, his old ship entered on her last turn of duty, harbour service at Sheerness as Guardship of Ordinary, Captain-Superintendent’s ship for the Fleet Reserve in the Medway. By an interesting coincidence, the officer who last of all hoisted his pennant on board the ‘Fighting’ Téméraire was the man who had been her first lieutenant at Trafalgar, now a grey-headed old post-captain, holding his last appointment before retiring from the Service as Captain-Superintendent of Sheerness dockyard, Captain Thomas Fortescue Kennedy. Actually the last guns that were ever fired on board the ‘Fighting’ Téméraire were for the Royal Salute in honour of Queen Victoria’s Coronation Day. Six weeks after that, on the 16th of August 1838, the Téméraire was put up for auction and sold for £5530 to Mr. Beatson, the Rotherhithe shipbreaker. She was sold out of the Navy ‘all standing,’ with her masts and yards still in her, just as her guard-ship crew left the vessel, as Turner saw her and has faithfully painted her: a fact, also, that explains what has puzzled many critics of the famous picture, the removal to be broken up of a man-of-war rigged and masted and with yards across.
So we come, at length, to the Téméraire’s final hour and her appointed end.
Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
And waves were white below;
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Nor know the conquered knee—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea.
All the way up the river on her last day, we are told, the Téméraire was cheered as she passed along by the crews of the merchant ships and the people on board the river steamboats ‘surprised as well as delighted by the novel spectacle of a 98-gun ship in the Pool,’117 while after they had begun to break the Téméraire up at Rotherhithe numbers of people came to visit ‘the ship that helped to avenge Nelson at Trafalgar,’ attracted by reports of the finding of Trafalgar relics on board. One of these was a round-shot, found deeply embedded in the centre of one of the Téméraire’s main-deck beams with a French sailor’s red cap, which had evidently been used as an improvised wad in the hurry of the fighting, stuck fast to it. Another was the brass memorial tablet (already spoken of), let into the quarter-deck near the wheel, and bearing the inscription, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’118
Two gigantic figures, quarter-gallery decorations, taken from the Téméraire during her breaking up, are still in existence, preserved by the successors to the firm at whose hands the old ship met her fate.119 Any one, also, who cares to make a pilgrimage among the byways of riverside London on the south side, may come across a church within a stone’s-throw of where the final scene in the Téméraire’s career was enacted—St. Paul’s, Globe Street, Rotherhithe—in which the altar, altar rails, and sanctuary chairs are all made of heart-of-oak carved from the frame timbers of the ‘Fighting’ Téméraire.
So the story reaches its close. It can hardly end better than with the eloquent passage in which Mr. Ruskin has delivered what is, in intent, the funeral oration at the passing of the ‘Fighting’ Téméraire.120
‘This particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial with chief victory, prevailing over the fatal vessel that had given Nelson death—surely, if anything without a soul deserved honour or affection, we owed them here. Those sails that strained so full bent into the battle, that broad bow that struck the surf aside, enlarging silently in steadfast haste, full front to the shot, resistless and without reply, those triple ports whose choirs of flame rang forth in their courses into the fierce revenging monotone, which, when it died away, left no answering voice to rise any more upon the sea against the strength of England—those sides that were wet with the long runlets of English life-blood, like press planks at vintage, gleaming goodly crimson down to the cast and clash of the washing foam—those pale masts that stayed themselves up against the war-ruin, shaking out their ensigns through the thunder, till sail and ensign drooped—steeped in the death-stilled pause of Andalusian air, burning with its witness-clouds of human souls at rest—surely for these some sacred care might have been left in our thoughts, some quiet space amidst the lapse of English waters? Nay, not so, we have stern keepers to trust her glory to—the fire and the worm. Never more shall sunset lay golden robe on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding. Perhaps, where the low gate opens to some cottage garden, the tired traveller may ask idly why the moss grows so green on its rugged wood, and even the sailor’s child may not answer, nor know, that the night dew lies deep in the war-rents of the wood of the old Téméraire.’
There’s a far bell ringing
At the setting of the sun
And a phantom voice is singing
Of the great days done.
There’s a far bell ringing,
And a phantom voice is singing
Of renown for ever clinging
To the great days done.
Footnotes
79 Ruskin, Notes on the Turner Collection, p. 80.
80 Thornbury’s Life of Turner, vol. i. pp. 335-336.
81 ‘She was towed up the river by two steam tugs; every vessel that she passed appeared like a pigmy.’—Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘Domestic Occurrences,’ September 16, 1838.
82 Ruskin, Notes on the Turner Collection, p. 81.
83 The Téméraire, of course, was fading up the river, but the exigences of euphony no doubt required the inversion.
84 The Téméraire, from which the Trafalgar Téméraire took her name, was a French 74, captured by Admiral Boscawen in his battle with De la Clue off Lagos in August 1759. She served in the British navy for some years, and after being utilised as a floating battery at Plymouth during the American War, was finally sold out of the service in 1783.
85 ‘“Thirty-six hours’ calm, and England is ours,” so says one of the French papers in announcing that the invasion of England is to be attempted before the 14th July. A division of the Imperial Guard has already arrived at Havre on its way to Boulogne, where the Emperor will arrive within a week.’—The Observer, June 24, 1804.
‘By an American gentleman just arrived from the Continent, we have received positive and authentic information that the Boulogne flotilla is in a complete state of equipment and ready to embrace the first opportunity of putting to sea. Whether that opportunity will ever be permitted to the enemy by our blockading squadrons remains to be seen. The troops stationed on the uplands above Boulogne, and in its vicinity, amount to upwards of 160,000 men.’—The Times, August 14, 1804.
86 Captain Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, vol. ii. p. 118.
87 Memoirs and Correspondence of Lord Collingwood, by G.L. Newnham Collingwood, p. 93.
88 Says the Observer for the 18th of December: ‘The motto of Admiral Cornwallis seems to be that from Dryden: “Endure and Conquer.” We could dwell upon this theme for ever. Others have simply taught the British Navy (apt scholars enough) to triumph. He has first instructed them in manly perseverance and endurance so opposite to the impetuosity of their natures. We could name the periods, and these too frequently occurring, when a damaged yard or topmast was a sufficient excuse for a good fortnight in port, and this with officers of acknowledged gallantry. What a contrast have we now! The hardy veteran deserves an Order of Merit to be invented on purpose for him.’ Without detracting from the admiral’s merits this is a little hard on some of Cornwallis’s predecessors—on Hawke, for instance, who in the Seven Years’ War blockaded Brest throughout ‘one of the worst winters on record.’ Says Horace Walpole, writing on the 14th of January 1760: ‘What milksops the Marlboroughs and Turennes, the Blakes and the Van Tromps appear now, who whipped into winter quarters the moment their noses looked blue. There is Hawke in the Bay weathering this winter, after conquering in a storm.’
89 The capture of Admiral Villeneuve’s frigate the Didon, sent out on a mission of the highest importance, by the British frigate Phœnix, prevented Villeneuve’s junction with another French fleet cruising in the Bay of Biscay. Hearing nothing of his colleague, Villeneuve, after leaving Ferrol, became nervous and turned south, instead of pushing on across the Bay for Brest as Napoleon expected him to do.
90 Wrote Collingwood to his wife on the 21st of August: ‘I have very little time to write to you, but must tell you what a squeeze we were like to have got yesterday. While we were cruising off the town, down came the combined fleet of thirty-three sail of men-of-war: we were only three poor things, with a frigate and a bomb, and drew off towards the Straits, not very ambitious, as you may suppose, to try our strength against such odds. They followed us as we retired, with sixteen large ships; but on our approaching the Straits they left us, and joined their friends in Cadiz, where they are fitting and replenishing their provisions. We, in our turn, followed them back, and to-day have been looking into Cadiz, where their fleet is now as thick as a wood’ (Memoirs and Correspondence of Lord Collingwood, by G.L. Newnham Collingwood, p. 109).
91 Rear-Admiral Hercules Robinson’s Sea Drift, p. 209.
92 Narrative by Lieut. P. Harris Nicolas, Royal Marines, of the Belleisle, quoted in the Memoir of Admiral Sir William Hargood, G.C.B., Appendix E, p. 279.
93 The ‘Combined Fleet’ was the everyday term in the Navy for the fleets of France and Spain while acting together. It was used also by the French and Spaniards themselves.
94 Admiral Duncan at Camperdown, eight years before, attacked in a double column formation, but the circumstances otherwise were totally different.
95 Memoirs and Services of General Sir S.B. Ellis, K.C.B., of the Royal Marines, p. 4. General Ellis was a second lieutenant of Marines in the Ajax at Trafalgar.
96 Letter from Lieut. W. Price Cumby, first lieutenant of the Bellerophon.
97 Personal Narrative of Events, Vice-Admiral Wm. Stanhope Lovell (formerly Badcock), p. 45.
98 James’s Naval History, vol. iii. p. 391.
99 Lieut. P. Harris Nicolas, Royal Marines, in the Memoir of Admiral Sir William Hargood, G.C.B., Appendix E, p. 279.
100 Episodios Nacionales, par B. Perez Galdos. Trafalgar, p. 157. Octava edicion. Madrid, 1893.
101 Combat de Trafalgar. Rapport fait au Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies, par E. Lucas, commandant le Redoutable, etc. Published by H. Letuaire. Hyères, 1891.
102 There were nearly 4000 French soldiers distributed among Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet, mostly embarked for the West Indies when it originally sailed from Toulon.
103 Personal Narrative of Events, Vice-Admiral Wm. Stanhope Lovell (formerly Badcock), pp. 46, 47.
104 ‘Les grenades pleuvent des hunes du Redoutable.’—Monumens des Victoires et Conquêtes des Français, vol. xvi. p. 174.
105 A terrible account of the awful carnage and destruction caused on board the Fougueux by the Téméraire’s broadside is given in a letter by Captain Pierre Servaux of the Marine Artillery on board the French ship, which was published in Paris in the Figaro on the 21st of October 1898.
106 6th May 1806. Biographie Maritime, etc., par M. Hennequin, Chef de Bureau au Ministère de la Marine. Paris, 1837; vol. iii. p. 85. Captain Lucas was born in 1764, and died in 1819. Two pictures of ‘The Redoutable at Trafalgar’ have been exhibited at the Salon.
107 Histoire de la Marine Française sous le Consulat et L’Empire, par E. Chevalier, p. 214. See also Monumens des Victoires et Conquêtes des Français, vol. xvi.
108 See Rear-Admiral Hercules Robinson’s Sea-Drift, p. 208.
109 Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth, by Edward Osler, Appendix A, p. 377.
110 Vice-Admiral Alava in the Santa Ana, who had surrendered to Collingwood in the Royal Sovereign.
111 Rear-Admiral Don B. Hidalgo Cisneros.
112 Admiral Dumanoir, writing from Tiverton in Devon, where he was interned as a prisoner of war, to the Times on January 2, 1806, in reply to certain adverse comments on his conduct, pleads that he was ‘handled very severely’ in his attack. Dumanoir and his ships were intercepted off Cape Finisterre, ten days after Trafalgar, and captured bodily by Sir Richard Strachan’s squadron. One of his ships is afloat to this day, our only existing Trafalgar prize, and with the Victory the last left of all that fought at Trafalgar—the Devonport training-ship Implacable. The Implacable fought at Trafalgar as the Duguay Trouin. On being taken into the British service in 1806, the Admiralty gave the ship her present name.
113 Marshall’s Naval Biography, vol. i. part i. p. 275.
114 Collingwood sent off his first short despatch announcing the battle and Nelson’s death, by the Pickle, a 4-gun schooner, on the 26th of October. The completed despatch gave full details of the battle and the casualty lists from most of the ships.
115 Vice-Admiral Pierre Charles Jean Baptiste Sylvestre de Villeneuve-Flayosc was born on December 31, 1763, five years after Nelson. He became garde de la Marine at fifteen. At the Revolution he dropped the particle nobiliaire from his name, and was thenceforward known simply as Villeneuve. Napoleon took a fancy to him after Villeneuve’s escape from the battle of the Nile, as a ‘lucky man,’ and to that fancy Villeneuve owed his command at Trafalgar.
116 Grand Master Hélion de Villeneuve, Grand Master of Rhodes; buried at Malta: Sainte Roseleyne de Villeneuve, Abbess of La Celle Roubaud.
117 Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘Domestic Occurrences,’ September 16, 1838.
118 See Notes and Queries, 7th Series, vol. vi. p. 371.
119 Messrs. H. Castle and Sons, of the Baltic Wharf, Millbank, S.W., to whose courtesy the author is indebted for the photographs of the two figures here reproduced.
120 Ruskin, Notes on the Turner Collection, pp. 81-82.