description of Trafalgar cannot confine itself to the facts of rigging and armament, weather and weight of broadside. Other, less material expectations are just as potent a presence in battle as the concrete realities of a ship in action. This book addresses that underlayer, the subtlest and slipperiest of historical levels: pre-conceptions, and the way they shape present behaviour. It is an attempt to describe the mental landscape of the people who fought and commanded at one of the great battles in history and it asks, in particular, why and how the idea of the hero flowered here.
Answers are inevitably complex, rooted in part in the twin classical inheritance of the ruthless, Greek, Achillean hero, who burns and destroys without thought to his own welfare; and the Roman, Virgilian hero, who is in many ways a schematic opposite of the Greek. He is civic where the Greek is ragingly individual. He serves the state, not his own self-driven destiny. He too must use violence but his violence is limited and proportionate. He conforms and conserves where Achilles dislocates and destroys. Like Cincinnatus, called to save Rome in her hour of crisis, the Roman hero returns, after he has performed his task, to the farm and the plough from which the needs of state had summoned him. (The Trafalgar fleet, from Nelson and Collingwood down, is full of men dreaming of trees, fields, gardens, peace and home.) When Jane Austen, the sister of two naval officers, has her heroine in Persuasion marry Captain Wentworth, she loves him because he belongs to ‘a profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance’. Wentworth looks after her as a Roman hero should. The Roman is part of a system, social and considerate. He sees himself as a servant. Like Aeneas, he carries his father, his nation on his shoulders. If Achilles is crisis and destruction, Aeneas is support and love.
That twin inheritance, the Virgilian and the Homeric, are both in play at Trafalgar and both are fused there with the contemporary passion for a burning apocalyptic fire. It is not usually done, either by naval or literary scholars, to put William Blake and Nelson in the same bracket—Blake openly despised Nelson, virtually as a war criminal—but to do so, and to understand their shared relationship to the visions and desires of contemporary England, is to understand both why Nelson was the object of so much love and hope in England—one of the first examples of a media-driven frenzy for a star—and why the men of the fleet he commanded fought and killed with such unbridled intensity and passion.
Scarcely anyone in England in 1805 could be more distant from Nelson than William Blake: the one, radical, poor, impractical and ‘hid’, as he described himself, buried in an artisan subculture of radicals and mystics outside any conceivable Establishment; the other deeply conservative, courted by the government, the most public figure in England. And yet, at this deeper level, at the level of the vision of the radiant orb, there is an astonishing and intimate connection between the imageries on which they both drew.
Neither trusted the old ways. ‘The Enquiry in England,’ Blake said, ‘is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen’s opinions in arts and science.’ Nelson could have said that. But it is in Blake’s concentrated encapsulation of the apocalyptic vision that he seems to be speaking most directly for the heart of the Nelsonian idea. Far more than the ranting prophets, whose language seems either mad or second-hand, Blake says conceptually what Nelsonian battle put into action. Nowhere is this more intense than in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, acid-etched by him into his copperplates in the decade before Trafalgar. They are a summary of Nelson’s method of battle:
Energy is eternal delight.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Without contraries is no progression.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Exuberance is Beauty.
In these revolutionary stabs at truth, which strip away the graceful hypocrisy of the Enlightenment, something of the Nelsonian soul is laid bare. As statements, they are deliberately primitive, beneath and beyond the elegances of civilisation, just as Nelson’s method of battle subverted the conventions of 18th-century warfare. Nelson lived and died for the ‘portions of eternity’ represented by love, violence and the destructive sword. He saw friendship as man’s most nurturing condition and devoted years of his life to cultivating intimacy with his fellow officers. Capable of intense sensuality, he loved the nakedness of a woman as an almost holy thing. The road of excess was not in itself the palace of wisdom, but certainly led there. He believed in action, not dwelling on action. His method was exuberance and the tigers of his wrath were undaunted by the horses of instruction.
Buried deep in the assumptions of England, was a spirit of daring and ferocity. Within the ferocity was a sense of cosmic beauty. That is the spirit of Blake’s greatest lyric, written ten or eleven years before Trafalgar, virtually unknown at the time, but full of a sublimity, a beauty in terror, which Blake’s publicly acknowledged contemporaries, most of them still engaged with the courtesies of the 18th century, could never have encompassed.
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
Those are precisely the questions to which Nelson and his Trafalgar fleet could give answers in the affirmative. This fleet was, if anything, a model of ‘fearful symmetry’. Here burned the ardour of destruction. Here were men who might aspire, who both confronted and delivered apocalyptic violence, who looked on battle not as a necessary evil but as a moment of revelation and truth. For James Martin, a 26-year-old able seaman on the Neptune, ‘Now the moment was fast advancing which was to Decide wether the Boasted Herosum of France and Spain or the Ginene Valour of free Born Britains was to Rule the Main…Death or Victory was the Gineral Resolution of our Ships Crew.’
In that light, the story of the British victory at Trafalgar is of a fleet of ships and men who, in a heroic mould, part Greek, part Roman, part Hebrew—the three-pronged roots of European violence—both dared to seize the fire and to use their apocalyptic inheritance as the fuel for lives of honour.
October 21st 1805 5.50 am to 12.30 pm
October 21st 18055.50 am to 8.30 am
Distance between fleets: 10 miles-6.5 miles
Victory’s heading and speed: 067°-078° at 3 knots
Zeal:
