of my breath I shall be as much attached to you as man can be, which I am sure you will credit. It is very odd how I have been dreaming all night of my carrying home dispatches. God send so much good luck! The day is fine; the sight of course, beautiful.…God bless you. No more at present.
Captain Edward Codrington on the Orion wrote smilingly to his wife:
We have now a nice air, which fills our flying kites and drives us along at four knots an hour…How would your heart beat for me, dearest Jane, did you but know that we are under every stitch of sail we can set, steering for the enemy.
Codrington missed Jane with a passion, writing to her that he was ‘full of hope that Lord Nelson’s declaration would be verified; viz. that we should have a good battle and go home to eat our Christmas dinner.’ On the Belleisle, Lieutenant Paul Nicolas described how
I was awakened by the cheers of the crew and by their rushing up the hatchways to get a glimpse of the hostile fleet. The delight manifested exceeded anything I ever witnessed, surpassing even those gratulations when our native cliffs are descried after a long period of distant service.
They were seeing battle as home, as the moment of perfection, with the sweet-smelling scents of Iberia wafting across the stretch of sea at which they had arrived, and the Atlantic breakers beyond it creaming on to the sand.
Over this very stretch of sea, 18 months before, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had sailed to Malta in convoy, shepherded by Captain Henry Bayntun in HMS Leviathan. For the poet it was a passage of troubled but at times ecstatic happiness, running from opium and hopelessness in England to the warmth of the Mediterranean. His journal of the voyage speaks, in a way no naval officer could, of the beauties which were so clearly felt on the morning of Trafalgar. ‘Oh with what envy I have gazed at our commodore,’ Coleridge wrote, half in love with ships,
the Leviathan of 74 guns, the majestic and beautiful creation, sailing right before us, upright, motionless, as a church with its steeple—as though moved by its will, as though its speed were spiritual.
This morning, Tuesday April 10th, 1804, a fine sharp morning—the Sea rolls rough & high / but the Ships are before us & behind us. I count 35, & the lonely Gulls fish in among the Ships / & what a beautiful object even a single wave is!
Delightful weather, motion, relation of the convoy to each other, all exquisite/—and I particularly watched the beautiful Surface of the Sea in this gentle Breeze!—every form so transitory, so for the instant, & and yet for that instant so substantial in all its sharp lines, steep surfaces, & hair-deep indentures, just as if it were cut glass, glass cut into ten thousand varieties / & then the network of the wavelets, & the rude circle hole network of the Foam /
And on the gliding Vessel Heaven & Ocean smil’d!
That is a line from one of Wordsworth’s poems in Lyrical Ballads, in which the female vagrant who speaks is in a wretched condition herself but can nevertheless grasp the beauty in the gliding Vessel before her. That is Coleridge’s predicament too, broken himself, but in love with the orderliness of the Leviathan’s convoy around him.
On the morning of the 21 October 1805, with the huge bluff ships surging beneath them and the sails slatting in the swells, there was little to do but contemplate the excellence of their own fleet and the prospect of violence to come. In the steady breeze and on the constant course, there was little need to adjust the trim of the sails. The only movement was at the wheel, where the helmsman steered to port as the swell lifted beneath him, to starboard as it dropped the bow in the trough that followed. Men had breakfast. Captains showed their lieutenants Nelson’s memorandum, in case they were ‘bowled out’ in the action and the lieutenants needed to take command. On the poops, their bands played ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Britons strike home’ and ‘Hearts of Oak’, first written after the triumphant victories of 1759, the Annus Mirabilis of the Seven Years War:
Come, cheer up my lads,
It’s to glory we steer,
To add something more
To this wonderful year.
To honour we call you,
As free men, not slaves,
For who are so free
As the sons of the waves?
Half the people who sang that were either pressed men or miscreants sent on board as part of a quota from each county, and a sixth of the entire fleet would desert or attempt to desert in the coming year (an average kept up throughout the Napoleonic war). Their average age was under 22. But the power of the British self-image as free men was such that in all probability these men believed what they sang: theirs was an honourable condition of freedom and order.
This profound shipboard orderliness was no chance effect. The ship itself was to be a model of order. Sailmakers were to see that sails were dry when they went into store, to make sure they were aired and to secure them from ‘drips, damps and vermin as much as possible.’ Proper sentinels were to be posted ‘to prevent people’s easing themselves in the hold or throwing anything there that may occasion nastiness.’ Rather than order, the prevention of disorder was the essence of naval life. Written Admiralty instructions required the boatswain and his mates on each ship ‘to be diligent…and see…that the working of the ship be performed with as little noise and confusion as possible.’ The ship, in fact, is to be worked in silence or near-silence. The repeating of orders was thought to be a symptom of slightly inadequate management.
In a world where the orderliness of things seems so close to disorder and disintegration, an almost dance-like form of behaviour, in which the set moves are made with some grace and precision, was a kind of bulwark against chaos, a guarantee of who you were. On these ships, theatricality of language and dress was more than mere display: it was a mark of civility and order, of a distance from the anarchic mob, of precisely the values for which the war against revolutionary-cum-imperial France was being fought. ‘Even a momentary dereliction of forms,’ one ship’s chaplain wrote, ‘might prove fatal to the general interest.’ St Vincent had insisted that his captains should remain aloof from their men and even from their brother officers. The idea of a captain eating dinner with his lieutenants appalled him. Distance was a method of command. It is the same instinct for order which lies, for example, behind an instruction issued by Lord St Vincent to the Mediterranean fleet in July 1796. The admiral wasn’t going to have any hint of casual drawing-room manners, nor the wit of elegant society, about his fleet or flagship:
The admiral having observed a flippancy in the behaviour of officers when coming upon the Victory’s quarterdeck and sometimes in receiving orders from a superior officer and that they do not pull off their hats and some not even touching them, it is his positive directions that any officer who shall in future so far forget this essential duty of respect and subordination be admonished publically; and he expects the officers of the Victory will set the example by taking their hats off on such occasions and not touching them with an air of negligence.
St Vincent was insistent that midshipmen should have a uniform ‘which distinguish their class to be in the rank of gentleman, and give them better credit and figure in executing the commands of their superior officers.’ Decks were to be swept at least twice a day, the dirt thrown overboard, men to change their linen twice a week, to wash frequently, to make sure the heads were clean every morning and evening. The ship was to appear ‘clean and neat from without board.’ These orders, written in order books, were to be kept on the quarterdeck and open to inspection ‘of every person belonging to the ship’, sometimes in a canvas case.
Filthy
