JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755
At 5.50 on the morning of 21 October 1805, just as dawn was coming up, the look-outs high on the mainmasts of the British fleet spied the enemy, about twelve miles away downwind. They had been tracking them for a day and a night, the body of their force kept carefully over the horizon, not only to prevent the French and Spanish taking fright and running from battle, but to remain upwind, ‘keeping the weather gage’, holding the trump card with which they would control and direct the battle to come. All night long, British frigates, stationed between the two fleets, had been burning pairs of blue lights, every hour on the hour, as pre-arranged. It was the agreed signal that the enemy was standing to the south, just as was wanted, straight into the jaws of the British guns.
Twenty minutes after the first sighting in the light of dawn, Nelson signalled to the fleet: ‘Form order of sailing in two columns.’ This was the attack formation in which he had instructed his captains over the preceding weeks. His next signal, at 06.22, confirmed what they all knew was inevitable: ‘Prepare for battle’. Twenty minutes after that, the French frigate Hermione, standing out to the west of her own battle fleet, peering into the dark of the retreating night, signalled to her flagship, the Bucentaure: ‘The enemy in sight to windward.’ For all 47,000 men afloat that morning, it felt like a day of destiny and decision. Most ships in both fleets were already cleared for action.
The French and Spanish were about twelve miles and the British about twenty-two miles off the coast of southwest Spain. The nearest point was Cape Trafalgar, an Arabic name, meaning the Point of the Cave, Taraf-al-Ghar. From the very top, the truck, of the highest masts in the British fleet, two hundred feet above the sea, you could just make out the blue smoky hills standing inland towards Seville. The wind was a light northwesterly, perhaps no more than Force 2 or 3, blowing at about 10 knots, but that was enough. A man-of-war would sail with a breeze so slight it could just be felt on the windward side of a licked finger. On the day of the battle, only the very largest ship, the vast Spanish four-decker, the Santísima Trinidad, did not respond to her helm. Most had just enough steerage way to manoeuvre. The sky was a pale, Neapolitan blue, with a few high clouds, and it was warm for the autumn. By midday, the Spanish meteorologists, recording the temperature in the Royal Observatory just outside Cadiz, would log 21° Celsius, about 70° Fahrenheit. In all ships in both fleets, men would strip to the waist. There was only one ominous element to the weather: a long, stirring swell was pushing in from the southwest, ‘the dog before its master’, the sign of a big Atlantic storm to come.
Twenty-six British ships-of-the-line were bearing down from to-windward. One more, the Africa, captained by Henry Digby, the richest man in the English fleet, who had won for himself £60,000 of prize money by the time he was thirty, perhaps £3-4 million in modern terms, had missed Nelson’s signal in the night, had got out of position and was now coming down from the north. The main body of the fleet was arranged a little raggedly, in two rough columns, ‘scrambling into action’ as one of the British captains described it afterwards, ‘in coveys’ as a Spaniard remembered it, as though the British fleet were a flock of partridges drifting in from the western horizon.
Nelson was already on the quarterdeck of Victory, a slight, grey-haired 47-year-old man, alert, wiry, anxious and intense, five feet four inches tall and irresistibly captivating in manner. Before battle, the remains of the arm he had lost in a catastrophic fight against the Spanish in the Canaries eight years before tended to quiver with the tension. ‘My fin’ he called it, and on his chairs he had a small patch particularly upholstered on the right arm, where he could rest this anxious stump. Like most naval officers, he was both tanned—the word used by unfriendly landlubbers to describe captains and admirals in Jane Austen’s Persuasion is ‘orange’—and prematurely aged, worn out by the worry and fretfulness of his life. At regular intervals, he would be struck, quite unexpectedly, by a terrifying and debilitating nervous spasm, his body releasing, in a surge of uncontrolled energy, the anxiety it had accumulated day by day. Only three weeks before Trafalgar, one such attack, suddenly coming on at four in the morning, had left him feeling enervated and confused. ‘I was hardly ever better than yesterday,’ he wrote to his lover Emma Hamilton,
and I slept uncommonly well; but was awoke with this disorder. The good people of England will not believe that rest of body and mind is necessary for me! But perhaps this spasm may not come again these six months. I had been writing seven hours yesterday; perhaps that had some hand in bringing it upon me.
The burden of work was unremitting. Drawings of the cabins of naval commanders of this period show pile on pile of papers, logbooks, files, notebooks, charts, musterbooks, and orderbooks. It was a navy that ran on paper.
No one who met Nelson thought he looked like a hero should. Lady Spencer, sophisticated wife of a distinguished First Lord of the Admiralty called Nelson ‘a most uncouth creature.’ His general appearance, she thought—and this was a woman who loved and admired him—‘was that of an idiot.’ He was the most feared naval commander in the world. In the previous seven years he had entirely destroyed, in brutally close action, both a French and a Danish fleet, with scarcely a thought for his own or his crews’ safety. ‘I consider the destruction of the Enemy’s Fleet of so much consequence,’ he had written within the last few months, ‘that I would willingly have half of mine burnt to effect their destruction. I am in a fever. God send I may find them.’ Naval warfare had not known such application since the wild mêlées of almost two centuries before. Nelson’s declared purpose, in letter after letter, was simple and total: ‘annihilation’. The spirit of Achilles was in him.
He was dressed this morning, as ever, in the coat on which the four stars of his orders of knighthood were embroidered in sequins. There was a drama to his presence. This was not Horatio Nelson, the smallish son of a Norfolk parson, the desperately anxious, self-justifying, sometimes jealous, sometimes squabblingly argumentative man he could so often appear from his letters; nor the extraordinarily unbuttoned lover; nor the friend of his brother officers and subordinates to whom, in an endless and ubiquitous cascade of ease and intimacy, he could bind himself with a single letter or even a look. This, as his orders still preserved in the Admiralty files in London repeatedly describe him, was:
The Right Honorable Lord Viscount Nelson k.b. Duke of Bronte in Sicily, Knight of the Great Cross of St Ferdinand & of Merit, Knight of the Order of the Crescent & of the Illustrious Orders of St Joachim, Vice-Admiral of the White and Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Ships and Vessels employed and to be employed on the Mediterranean Station.
Here was the Trafalgar amalgam, Achilles as the servant of the state, an intense and passionate man, in whom one of the forms which passion took was the precise and unending attention to the details of order and organisation on which successful war depended.
The slowness of it would surprise us today, a murderous punch delivered at just about walking pace. The British ships, with all sails set, were moving at no more than two or three miles an hour. Ships’ boats rowed the frigate captains over to the flagship. In most ships, breakfast and then lunch were served to the men. According to Nelson’s particular instructions, all the men were given wine not the mixture of rum and water known in the navy as grog. As each swell came through, picking up the starboard quarter, travelling the length of the hull and then dropping the bow in the trough that followed, the huge rectangular bodies of the ships-of-the-line, built more for strength than speed, wooden blockhouses with oak walls three feet thick, their length no more than three or four times their beam, surged forward for a moment, only to fall back into a low, lazy wallow. Swell in light airs slats and bangs at sails and yards. From the slow scraping to and fro of an unoiled block, the creak of the main-top irons, the ‘frequent crack, crack of the tiller’ as the helmsman adjusted to each swell, the snatch and tug of a gust at the canvas, the pulling of the hard-eyes at the shackles on deck, everyone on every ship would have known that a storm would be on them before a day or two was out.
For over six steady
