British Isles was to be precisely triangulated, surveyed and mapped, had been founded in 1793. Income tax had been imposed by Pitt for the first time in 1798. Deduction at source had followed two years later. The first National Census had been conducted in 1801. A year later Thomas Telford had spanned the Thames in one leap with the new London Bridge. In 1803 Luke Howard had named the clouds for the first time. The numbering of London houses became compulsory in 1805. In January 1806, on station off the coast of South America, Captain Francis Beaufort developed the first version of the Beaufort scale by which, ever since, wind has been calibrated in precise increments.
The entire value system of a figure such as Barham was based not on the Nelsonian virtues of dash, inspiration and the heroic but on understanding, reason, clarity and order. Barham’s cousin and predecessor at the Admiralty Lord Melville had declared that his purpose was ‘to know with perfect accuracy the real state of the British navy as it now stands, with reference as well to the immediate calls upon it, as with a view to its progressive improvement to meet future contingencies. It is my duty to communicate the result of my investigation, for the information of his Majesty and his confidential servants.’ Latinate, explicit, attentive, prospective, urgent: this language forms the essential bedrock on which the fleets of 1805, the victory at Trafalgar and the 19th-century idea of the English hero were all laid.
It was, at some intuitive level, an appreciation of the fleet which had penetrated deep into English national consciousness. The navy was beautiful, substantial, orderly and English. Wordsworth would stand on the Dorset shore and stare, as his sister Dorothy wrote to their brother, ‘at the West India fleet sailing in all its glory.’ William Cobbett, as a boy, had felt his entire sense of being shift into another plane when, in the 1770s,
from the top of Portsdown, I, for the first time, beheld the sea, and no sooner did I behold it than I wished to be a sailor. But it was not the sea alone that I saw: the grand fleet was riding at anchor at Spithead. I had heard of the wooden walls of Old England: I had formed my ideas of a ship, and of a fleet; but what I now beheld, so far surpassed what I had ever been able to form a conception of, that I stood lost between astonishment and admiration. I had heard talk of all the glorious deeds of our admirals and sailors [which] good and true Englishmen never fail to relate to their children about a hundred times a year. The sight of the fleet brought all these into my mind in confused order, it is true, but with irresistible force. My heart was inflated with national pride. The sailors were my countrymen; the fleet belonged to my country, and surely I had my part in it, and in all its honours…
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