ever more of the eyepieces of their telescopes. A few miles out from the Spanish coast, and keeping warily away from the line of reefs and shoals which rim that shore between Cadiz and Cape Trafalgar, the combined Spanish and French fleet of 33 ships-of-the-line had been, according to orders received from Napoleon himself, attempting to make their way down into the Strait of Gibraltar and then on into the Mediterranean, heading for southern Italy where they were to land the 4,000 French soldiers they had on board. This force was to secure Naples and guard the Emperor’s southern flank as he invaded central Europe.
The Combined Fleet was not in good order. They had inched out of Cadiz over the previous 36 hours, intently watched by Nelson’s guard-dogs, every move, every hoisting of a yard, every bending of a sail transmitted by flag signal to the admiral waiting over the horizon. But the wind conditions had been difficult, their manoeuvres had been poorly executed and by this morning several ships had slipped far to leeward of the line. Mutual contempt prevailed between French and Spanish officers. The French considered the Spanish incompetent, the Spanish thought the French treacherous. Much of this fleet had fought an action together against a British squadron in July, in which two Spanish ships had been captured by the British, the result, the Spanish thought, of French failure to defend them. The French of course saw it only as evidence of Spanish hopelessness at sea. An atmosphere of anxiety and gloom had settled on them all. As the Spaniards had left the final angry Council of War in Cadiz, two days earlier, they had bowed to Villeneuve, the French Commander-in-Chief ‘with a resigned demeanour, like gladiators of old Rome, making their salute in the arena: “Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!” Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.’
The asymmetry between British confidence and Franco—Spanish despair, at the very beginning of the battle, is the governing condition of Trafalgar. The battle was lost and won before a moment of it was fought. This was a meeting the British had desired for at least two years, a chance to establish their command of the world ocean. But it was a meeting which their enemies, as they quite explicitly repeated in dispatch after dispatch to Madrid, Paris and on to Napoleon’s mobile headquarters, then in Germany, did not desire at all. The French and Spanish commanders knew, as if it were their destiny, that a catastrophe awaited them.
In the light of this, what happened at Trafalgar is, on one level, not complicated: a highly ambitious, confident and aggressive English battle fleet found and attacked a larger combined French and Spanish fleet whose morale was broken, and whose command was divided and without conviction, and heavily defeated it, by killing and disabling very large numbers of its officers and crew. In some ways, that was all: a pack of dogs battened on to a flock of sheep.
It is an easy description and in some ways inaccurate. The sheep were armed, brave, obstinate and frightening and did dreadful damage to the British attackers. Nevertheless there is a kernel of truth in it and the description raises questions. Why were the English so ambitious, so confident and so aggressive? Why were these crews, about half of them there against their own will, prepared to accept the level of risk which their commanders offered them? Why, in their different ways, were the French and Spanish so broken, so pusillanimous, so defeatist? Why did the British manage to kill ten times more of their enemy than they did of the British? How by 1805 had the Royal Navy become the most effective maritime killing machine in the world? And how had the French and Spanish, each with their long, dignified and noble naval traditions, become their quivering and broken victims?
There are technological answers to these questions, to do with ships and guns, but they are not enough. Two British ships, the Berwick and the Swiftsure, both in fact fought on the French side during the battle. They had been captured from the British during the war. The British Belleisle had begun life as the French Formidable, captured off the Breton coast in 1795. Many of the British ships had anyway been built as copies of French men-of-war. The British Achille for example was a precise copy of the French 74-gun ship Pompée, which had been captured by the British in 1793. The Spanish fleet had in large part been built by renegade Catholic Irishmen, using British ship-building techniques, even in the Spanish yards in Cuba, and including the greatest ship of all, the four-decker Santísima Trinidad, entirely constructed of sweet-smelling Cuban cedar.
Technology does not distinguish the fleets—or at least not sufficiently. What makes them different are the people on board. Trafalgar is a meeting of men. It is in the men that the difference lies between aggression and the need to defend; between the desire to attack and destroy and the desperate fear for one’s life; between the ability to persist in battle when surrounded by gore, grief and destruction and the need to submit to the natural instincts to surrender; and between a reliance on an old-fashioned tactical method of defence—the well-closed-up line—and a hungry, searching and disconcerting inventiveness which blew that defence into atoms. The day of Trafalgar was one in which three complex variations of the early 19th-century European frame of mind was put to the test.
Both French and Spanish regarded the British with fear and contempt. When the Spanish declared war on Great Britain in 1797, the Madrid government had explained its decision to go to war by describing how
that ambitious and greedy nation has once more proclaimed to the world that she recognizes no law but that of aggrandizement of her own trade, achieved by her global despotism on the high seas; our patience is spent, our forbearance is exhausted: we must now turn our gaze to the dignity of our throne…We must now declare war on the King of England and the English nation.
The values that were in conflict here are obvious enough, and reminiscent of 20th-century European attitudes to America: British amoral commercial ruthlessness set against the dignified, aristocratic patience and honour of old Spain. It is the repeated note in the contemporary Spanish view of Britain, confirmed after an incident in October 1804, when Spain was reluctantly in alliance with France but not yet formally at war with Britain, and which established the British fleet in Spanish eyes as little more than statesponsored pirates.
A powerful group of four British frigates under the command of Captain Graham Moore, as commodore of the squadron, was cruising off Cadiz, with orders to detain any Spanish ships they should fall in with. Early on the morning of 5 October, they spotted four large Spanish frigates coming in from the west and making for Cadiz harbour. After an initial parley, in which the Spanish refused to surrender, the British rapidly savaged their opponents. They had come from Montevideo, with four million South American gold dollars on board as well as hides and furs. Two of the Spanish frigates were captured, described as ‘torn to pieces’ when later brought into Spithead, and one of them, the Mercedes, blew up, killing everyone on board.
What scandalised Spanish opinion more than anything else, though, were the civilian casualties. The wife of a colonel of artillery was wounded in the battle and died of her wounds when a prisoner in England. On the Mercedes were a large number of ‘Spanish gentlemen and 19 ladies,’ as it was reported in the Naval Chronicle, ‘with their families, from Lima, returning to Old Spain, who, with the Spanish Captain, his wife, and seven children, all unfortunately perished in the explosion which took place.’ The presence of these people was known to the British commodore, but he had no hesitation, once the Spaniards had refused his invitation to accompany him to an English port, in making, as he described it in his dispatch, ‘the signal for close battle, which was instantly commenced with all the alacrity and vigour of English sailors.’ Moore was acting entirely in accord with British government policy. As Lord Harrowby, the British Foreign Secretary informed the Madrid Court, ‘it was an act done in express orders from his Majesty, to detain all ships laden with treasure for Spain.’ Spain was paying reluctant subsidies to France and so her bullion was seen by the British as war material. Heartlessness at sea, and never more than when in pursuit of gold, was British policy. Nelson himself was described by the deeply conservative and nationalistic Spanish poet Francisco Sánchez Barbaro as ‘el tirano del mar’ and ‘el héroe más bárbaro y tirano’. In the daily Diario de Madrid, the British in general were seen as ‘los arrogantes usurpadores de la libertad de los mares’. It seems, in retrospect,
