"Wherever the gleams of an English fire
On an English roof-tree shine,
Wherever the fire of a youth's desire
Is laid upon Honour's shrine,
Wherever brave deeds are treasured and told,
In the tale of the deeds of yore,
Like jewels of price in a chain of gold
Are the name and the fame he bore.
Wherever the track of our English ships
Lies white on the ocean foam,
His name is sweet to our English lips
As the names of the flowers at home;
Wherever the heart of an English boy
Grows big with a deed of worth,
Such names as his name have begot the same,
Such hearts will bring it to birth."
--E. NESBIT.
It was the night of October 20, 1805, a night moonless and black. In the
narrow waters at the western throat of the Straits of Gibraltar, at
regular intervals of three minutes through the whole night, the deep
voice of a gun broke out and swept, a pulse of dying sound, almost to
either coast, while at every half-hour a rocket soared aloft and broke in
a curve of stars in the black sky. It was one of Nelson's repeating
frigates signalling to the British fleet, far off to the south-west,
Villeneuve's movements. Nelson for more than a week had been trying to
daintily coax Villeneuve out of Cadiz, as an angler might try to coax a
much-experienced trout from the cool depths of some deep pool. He kept
the main body of his fleet sixty leagues distant--west of Cape St.
Mary--but kept a chain of frigates within signalling distance of each
other betwixt Cadiz and himself. He allowed the news that he had
detached five of his line-of-battle ships on convoy duty to the eastward
to leak through to the French admiral, but succeeded in keeping him in
ignorance of the fact that he had called in under his flag five ships of
equal force from the westward.
On October 19, Villeneuve, partly driven by hunger, and by the news that
a successor was on the road from Paris to displace him, and partly
tempted by the belief that he had before him a British fleet of only
twenty-one ships of the line, crept out of Cadiz with thirty-three ships
of the line--of which three were three-deckers--and seven frigates.
Nelson had twenty-seven sail of the line with four frigates. The wind
was light, and all through the 20th, Villeneuve's fleet, formed in seven
columns--the _Santissima Trinidad_ towering like a giant amongst
them--moved slowly eastward. Nelson would not alarm his foe by making
too early an appearance over the sky-line. His frigates signalled to him
every few minutes, through sixty miles of sea-air, the enemy's movements;
but Nelson himself held aloof till Villeneuve was too far from Cadiz to
make a dash back to it and safety. All through the night of the 20th,
Villeneuve's great fleet--a procession of mighty phantoms--was dimly
visible against the Spanish coast, and the British frigates sent the news
in alternate pulses of sound and flame to Nelson, by this time eagerly
bearing up from Cape St. Mary.
The morning of the 21st broke misty, yet bright. The sea was almost like
a floor of glass. The faintest of sea-airs blew. A lazy Atlantic swell
rolled at long intervals towards the Straits, and the two fleets at last
were visible to each other. Villeneuve's ships stretched a waving and
slightly curved line, running north and south, with no regularity of
order. The British fleet, in two compact and parallel columns, half a
mile apart, came majestically on from the west. The ships in each column
followed each other so closely that sometimes the bow of one was thrust
past the quarter of the ship in advance of it. Nelson, in the _Victory_,
headed one column, Collingwood, in the _Royal Sovereign_, led the other,
and each flagship, it was to be noted, led with a clear interval between
itself and its supports.
Villeneuve had a tactician's brain, and his battle-plan was admirable.
In a general order, issued just before leading out his fleet, he told his
captains, "There is nothing to alarm us in the sight of an English fleet.
Their 64-gun ships have not 500 men on board; they are not more brave
than we are; they are harassed by a two-years' cruise; they have fewer
motives to fight well!" Villeneuve explained that the enemy would attack
in column, the French would meet the attack in close line of battle; and,
with a touch of Nelson's spirit, he urged his captains to take every
opportunity of boarding, and warned them that every ship not under fire
would be counted a defaulter.
Nelson's plan was simple and daring. The order of sailing was to be the
order of battle. Collingwood leading one column, and he the other, would
pierce the enemy's lines at points which would leave some twelve of the
enemy's ships to be crushed betwixt the two British lines. Nelson, whose
brooding genius forecast every changing eddy of battle, gave minute
instructions on a score of details. To prevent mistakes amid the smoke
and the fight, for example, he had the hoops on the masts of every
British ship painted yellow; every ship was directed to fly a St.
George's ensign, with the Union Jack at the fore-topmast, and another
flying from the top-gallant stays. That he would beat the enemy's fleet
he calmly took for granted, but he directed that every effort should be
made to capture its commander-in-chief. Nelson crowned his instructions
with the characteristic remark, that "in case signals were obscure, no
captain can do wrong if he places his ship alongside of an enemy."
[Illustration: The Attack at Trafalgar, October 21st, 1805. Five minutes
past noon. From Mahan's "Life of Nelson."]
By twelve o'clock the two huge fleets were slowly approaching each other:
the British columns compact, grim, orderly; the Franco-Spanish line
loose, but magnificently picturesque, a far-stretching line of lofty
hulls, a swaying forest of sky-piercing masts. They still preserve the
remark of one prosaic British sailor, who, surveying the enemy through an
open port, offered the comment, "What a fine sight, Bill, yon ships would
make at Spithead!"
It is curious to reflect how exactly both British and French invert on
sea their land tactics. French infantry attack in column, and are met by
British infantry in line; and the line, with its steadfast courage and
wide front of fire, crushes the column. On sea, on the other hand, the
British attack in column, and the French meet the attack in line; but the
column wins. But it must be admitted that the peril of this method of
attack is enormous. The leading ship approaches, stern on, to a line of
fire which, if steady enough, may well crush her by its concentration of
flame. Attack in column, in fact, means that the leading ships are
sacrificed to secure victory for the ships in the rear. The risks of
this method of attack at Trafalgar were enormously increased by the light
and uncertain quality of the wind. Collingwood, in the _Royal
Sovereign_, and Nelson, in the _Victory_, as a matter of fact, drifted
slowly rather than sailed, stern on to the broadsides of their enemy.
The leading British ships, with their stately heights of swelling canvas,
moved into the raking fire of the far-stretching Franco-Spanish line at a
speed of about two knots an hour. His officers knew that Nelson's ship,
carrying the flag of the commander-in-chief, as it came slowly on, would
be the mark for every French gunner, and must pass through a tempest of
flame before it could fire a shot in reply; and Blackwood begged Nelson
to let the _Téméraire_--"the fighting _Téméraire_"--take the _Victory's_
place at the head of the column. "Oh yes, let her go ahead," answered
Nelson, with a queer smile; and the _Téméraire_ was hailed, and ordered
to take the lead. But Nelson meant that the _Téméraire_ should take the
_Victory's_ place only if she could, and he watched grimly to see that
not a sheet was let fly or a sail shortened to give the _Téméraire_ a
chance of passing; and so the _Victory_ kept its proud and perilous lead.
Collingwood led the lee division, and had the honour of beginning the
mighty drama of Trafalgar. The _Royal Sovereign_ was newly coppered,
and, with every inch of canvas outspread, got so far ahead of her
followers, that after Collingwood had broken into the French line, he
sustained its fire, unhelped, for nearly twenty minutes before the
_Belleisle_, the ship next following, could fire a gun for his help.
Of Collingwood, Thackeray says, "I think, since Heaven made gentlemen, it
never made a better one than Cuthbert Collingwood," and there was, no
doubt, a knightly and chivalrous side to Collingwood worthy of King
Arthur's round table. But there was also a side of heavy-footed
common-sense, of Dutch-like frugality, in Collingwood, a sort of
wooden-headed unimaginativeness which looks humorous when set against the
background of such a planet-shaking fight as Trafalgar. Thus on the
morning of the fight he advised one of his lieutenants, who wore a pair
of boots, to follow his example and put on stockings and shoes, as, in
the event of being shot in the leg, it would, he explained, "be so much
more manageable for the surgeon." And as he walked the break of his poop
in tights, silk stockings, and buckled shoes, leading, in his single
ship, an attack on a fleet, he calmly munched an apple. To be able to
munch an apple when beginning Trafalgar is an illustration of what may be
called the quality of wooden-headed unimaginativeness in Collingwood.
And yet Collingwood had a sense of the scale of the drama in which he was
taking part. "Now, gentlemen," he said to his officers, "let us do
something to-day which the world may talk of hereafter." Collingwood, in
reality, was a great man and a great seaman, and in the battle which
followed he "fought like an angel," to quote the amusingly inappropriate
metaphor of Blackwood.
The two majestic British columns moved slowly on, the great ships, with
ports hauled up and guns run out, following each other like a procession
of giants. "I suppose," says Codrington, who commanded the _Orion_, "no
man ever before saw such a sight." And the element of humour was added
to the scene by the spectacle of the tiny _Pickle_, a duodecimo schooner,
gravely hanging on to the quarter of an 80-gun ship--as an actor in the
fight describes it--"with the boarding-nettings up, and her tompions out
of her four guns--about as large and as formidable as two pairs of
Wellington boots."
Collingwood bore down to the fight a clear quarter of a mile ahead of the
next ship. The fire of the enemy, like so many spokes of flame
converging to a centre, broke upon him. But in silence the great ship
moved ahead to a gap in the line between the _Santa Anna_, a huge black
hulk of 112 guns, and the _Neptune_, of 74. As the bowsprit of the
_Royal Sovereign_ slowly glided past the stern of the _Santa Anna_,
Collingwood, as Nelson had ordered all his captains, cut his
studding-sails loose, and they fell, a cloud of white canvas, into the
water. Then as the broadside of the _Royal Sovereign_ fairly covered the
stern of the _Santa Anna_, Collingwood spoke. He poured with deadly aim
and suddenness, and at pistol-shot distance, his whole broadside into the
Spaniard's stern. The tempest of shot swept the unhappy _Santa Anna_
from end to end, and practically destroyed that vessel. Some 400 of its
crew are said to have been killed or wounded by that single discharge!
At the same moment Collingwood discharged his other broadside at the
_Neptune_, though with less effect; then swinging round broadside to
broadside on the Spanish ship, he swept its decks again and again with
his guns. The first broadside had practically done the Spaniard's
business; but its captain, a gallant man, still returned what fire he
could. All the enemy's ships within reach of Collingwood had meanwhile
opened on him a dreadful fire; no fewer than five line-of-battle ships
were emptying their guns upon the _Royal Sovereign_ at one time, and it
seemed marvellous that the British ship was not shattered to mere
splinters by the fire poured from so many quarters upon her. It was like
being in the heart of a volcano. Frequently, it is said, the British saw
the flying cannon-balls meet in mid-air. The seamen fell fast, the sails
were torn, the bulwarks shattered, the decks ran red with blood. It was
at that precise moment, however, that Collingwood said to his captain,
"What would not Nelson give to be here!" While at the same instant
Nelson was saying to Hardy, "See how that noble fellow Collingwood takes
his ship into action!"
The other ships of Collingwood's column were by this time slowly drifting
into the fight. At a quarter past twelve the _Belleisle_, the next ship,
ranged under the stern of the unfortunate _Santa Anna_, and fired her
larboard guns, double shotted, into that ship, with the result that her
three masts fell over the side. She then steered for the _Indomptable_,
an 80-gun ship, and sustained at the same moment the fire of two Spanish
seventy-fours. Ship after ship of Collingwood's column came steadily up,
and the roar of the battle deepened as in quick-following crashes each
new line-of-battle ship broke into the thunder of broadsides.
Nelson, leading the weather column, steered a trifle to the northward, as
the slowly moving line of the enemy pointed towards Cadiz. Nelson had
given his last orders. At his mainmast head was flying, fast belayed,
the signal, "Engage the enemy more closely." Nelson himself walked
quietly to and fro on the little patch of clear plank, scarcely seven
yards long, on the quarter-deck of the _Victory_, whence he could command
the whole ship, and he wore the familiar threadbare frock uniform coat,
bearing on the left breast four tarnished and lack-lustre stars. Then
came the incident of the immortal signal. "We must give the fleet," said
Nelson to Blackwood, "something by way of a fillip." After musing a
while, he said, "Suppose we signal, 'Nelson confides that every man will
do his duty'?" Some one suggested "England" instead of "Nelson," and
Nelson at once caught at the improvement. The signal-officer explained
that the word "confide" would have to be spelt, and suggested instead the
word "expects," as that was in the vocabulary. So the flags on the
masthead of the _Victory_ spelt out the historic sentence to the slowly
moving fleet. That the signal was "received with cheers" is scarcely
accurate. The message was duly acknowledged, and recorded in the log of
every ship, but perhaps not one man in every hundred of the actors at
Trafalgar knew at the moment that it had been sent. But the message
rings in British ears yet, across ninety years, and will ring in the ears
of generations yet unborn.
Nelson led his column on a somewhat slanting course into the fight. He
was bent on laying himself alongside the flagship of the enemy, and he
knew that this must be one of the three great line-of-battle ships near
the huge _Santissima Trinidad_. But there was no sign to show which of
the three carried Villeneuve. At half-past twelve the ships upon which
the _Victory_ was moving began to fire single shots at her slowly
drifting hulk to discover whether she was within range. The seventh of
these shots, fired at intervals of a minute or so, tore a rent through
the upper canvas of the _Victory_--a rent still to be seen in the
carefully preserved sail. A couple of minutes of awful silence followed.
Slowly the _Victory_ drifted on its path, and then no fewer than eight of
the great ships upon which the _Victory_ was moving broke into such a
tempest of shot as perhaps never before was poured on a single ship. One
of the first shots killed Scott, Nelson's secretary; another cut down
eight marines standing in line on the _Victory's_ quarter-deck; a third
passed between Nelson and Hardy as they stood side by side. "Too warm
work to last long, Hardy," said Nelson, with a smile. Still the
_Victory_ drifted majestically on its fiery path without an answering gun.
The French line was irregular at this point, the ships lying, in some
instances, two or three deep, and this made the business of "cutting" the
line difficult. As Nelson could not pick out the French flagship, he
said to Hardy, "Take your choice, go on board which you please;" and
Hardy pointed the stern of the Victory towards a gap between the
_Redoutable_, a 74-gun ship, and the _Bucentaure_. But the ship moved
slowly. The fire upon it was tremendous. One shot drove a shower of
splinters upon both Nelson and Hardy; nearly fifty men and officers had
been killed or wounded; the Victory's sails were riddled, her
studding-sail booms shot off close to the yard-arm, her mizzen-topmast,
shot away. At one o'clock, however, the _Victory_ slowly moved past the
stern of the _Bucentaure_, and a 68-pounder carronade on its forecastle,
charged with a round shot and a keg of 500 musket balls, was fired into
the cabin windows of the French ship. Then, as the great ship moved on,
every gun of the remaining fifty that formed its broadside--some of them
double and treble loaded--was fired through the Frenchman's cabin windows.
The dust from the crumpled woodwork of the _Bucentaure's_ stern covered
the persons of Nelson and the group of officers standing on the
_Victory's_ quarter-deck, while the British sailors welcomed with a
fierce shout the crash their flying shot made within the Frenchman's
hull. The _Bucentaure_, as it happened--though Nelson was ignorant of
the fact--was the French flagship; and after the battle its officers
declared that by this single broadside, out of its crew of nearly 1000
men, nearly 400 were struck down, and no less than twenty guns dismounted!
But the _Neptune_, a fine French 80-gun ship, lay right across the
water-lane up which the _Victory_ was moving, and it poured upon the
British ship two raking broadsides of the most deadly quality. The
_Victory_, however, moved on unflinchingly, and the _Neptune_, fearing to
be run aboard by the British ship, set her jib and moved ahead; then the
_Victory_ swung to starboard on to the _Redoutable_. The French ship
fired one hurried broadside, and promptly shut her lower-deck ports,
fearing the British sailors would board through them. No fewer, indeed,
than five French line-of-battle ships during the fight, finding
themselves grinding sides with British ships, adopted the same course--an
expressive testimony to the enterprising quality of British sailors. The
_Victory_, however, with her lower-deck guns actually touching the side
of the _Redoutable_, still kept them in full and quick action; but at
each of the lower-deck ports stood a sailor with a bucket of water, and
when the gun was fired--its muzzle touching the wooden sides of the
_Redoutable_--the water was dashed upon the ragged hole made by the shot,
to prevent the Frenchman taking fire and both ships being consumed.
The guns on the upper deck of the _Victory_ speedily swept and silenced
the upper deck of the _Redoutable_, and as far as its broadsides were
concerned, that ship was helpless. Its tops, however, were crowded with
marksmen, and armed with brass coehorns, firing langrage shot, and these
scourged with a pitiless and most deadly fire the decks of the _Victory_,
while the _Bucentaure_ and the gigantic _Santissima Trinidad_ also
thundered on the British flagship.