Sharpe's Trafalgar (40 page)

There was no Pucelle, nor a Revenant. Nelson fought Trafalgar with twenty-seven ships of
the line, while the combined French and Spanish fleet had thirty-three. By day’s end
seventeen of those enemy ships had struck their colors and one had been destroyed by fire,
making Trafalgar the most decisive naval battle until Midway. The British lost no ships
but paid, of course, the price of Nelson’s life. He was the matchless hero of the Napoleonic
wars, as beloved by his men as he was feared by the enemy. He was also, of course, a famous
adulterer, and his last request of his country was that Britain should look after Lady
Hamilton. The granting of that request lay in the power of politicians, and politicians do
not change, so Lady Hamilton died in miserable penury.

On the night after the battle a huge storm blew up and all but four of the seventeen
prizes were lost. Many were being towed, but the storm was too fierce and the tows were cast
off. Three of the prizes sank, two were deliberately set afire and five were wrecked.
Another three captured ships, manned by prize crews too small to cope with the storm, were
handed back to their original crews and sailed to safety, but they were so damaged by battle
and storm that none was fit to sail again. Of the fifteen enemy ships that escaped capture in
battle, four were taken by the Royal Navy and one was wrecked in the next two weeks. Many of
the British ships were as badly damaged as the French or Spanish, but superb seamanship
brought them all safe into port.

The Pucelle, when it raked the ship alongside the Victory, was stealing the Temeraire’s
thunder. The Redoutable was commanded by a fiery Frenchman called Lucas, probably the
ablest French captain at Trafalgar, who had trained his crew in a novel technique aimed
solely at boarding and capturing an enemy ship. When the Victory closed on his much
smaller ship he shut his gunports and massed his men on deck. His rigging was filled with
marksmen who rained a dreadful fire onto the Victory, and it was one of those men who shot
Nelson. Lucas virtually cleared the Victory’s upper decks of men, but just as he was
assembling his crew to board the British flagship, the Temeraire sailed past and emptied her
carronades into the boarders. The “Saucy” also raked Lucas’s ship which was, anyway, being
pounded by the Victory’s lower-deck guns.

That finished Lucas’s fight. The Redoutable was captured, but had been so damaged by
gunfire that she sank in the subsequent storm. The Victory lost 57 men dead, including
Nelson, and had 102 wounded. The Redoutable, in contrast, had 22 of her 74 guns dismounted
and, from a crew of 643, had 487 killed and 81 wounded. That extraordinarily high
casualty rate (88%) was caused by gunnery, not musketry. Other enemy ships suffered
similar high casualty rates. The Royal Sovereign’s opening broadside (double-shotted)
raked the French Fougueux and killed or injured half her crew in that one blow. When the
Victory, later in the battle, raked Villeneuve’s flagship, the Bucentaure, she
dismounted twenty of her eighty guns and again killed or wounded half the crew.

The disparity in casualty rates was extraordinary. The British lost 1,500 men, either
killed or wounded, while the French and Spanish casualties were about 17,000; testimony
to the horrific effectiveness of British gunnery. Several British ships were raked, as
the fictional Pucelle was, but none recorded the high casualties suffered aboard the
enemy ships that found themselves bow or stern on to a British broadside. The Victory
suffered the highest casualty list of the British fleet, while probably the most battered
of all the British ships, the Belleisle, which sailed into the southern melee and was raked
more than once, losing all her masts and bowsprit, suffered only 33 men killed and 93
wounded. Fourteen of the enemy ships lost more than a hundred men killed, while only
fourteen British ships had ten or more men killed. One British ship, HMS Prince, she who “sailed
like a haystack,” had no casualties at all, probably because her slow speed kept her from
battle until late in the afternoon when few enemies were capable of putting up much
resistance. The imbalance of casualties disguises the tenacity with which most of the
enemy fought. They were being decimated by superior British gunnery, yet they
stubbornly stuck to their guns. Most of the French and Spanish crews were ill-trained, some
had no prior experience of fighting at sea, yet they did not lack for courage.

The Victory’s high casualty rate was partly caused by Lucas’s tactics of drenching
her with musket fire and partly because she was the first British ship into the northern
part of the enemy’s fleet and so fought alone for a brief time. She was also flying the
admiral’s pennant and so became a target for several enemy ships. Collingwood’s
flagship, the Royal Sovereign, first into the southern part of the enemy fleet and also
flying an admiral’s pennant, lost 47 men dead and had 94 wounded, the greatest
casualties of any ship in Collingwood’s squadron. Admirals led from the front.

The battle was truly decisive. It so shocked the morale of the French and Spanish navies
that neither recovered for the remainder of the Napoleonic wars. British sea power was
supreme, and stayed so until the beginning of the twentieth century. Nelson, more than
any man, imposed Britain on the nineteenth-century world. It is often said that his
tactics were revolutionary, and so they were in the context of eighteenth-century naval
warfare where the accepted mode of fighting one fleet against another was to form
parallel lines of battle and fight it out broadside to broadside. Yet, in 1797, off
Camperdown, Admiral Duncan had formed his fleet of sixteen British battleships into two
squadrons that he sailed straight into the broadsides of eighteen Dutch ships of the line, and
by battle’s end he had captured eleven of those ships and lost none of his own. This is not to
denigrate Nelson, who had proved his resourcefulness time and again, but it suggests the
Royal Navy was open to innovative thinking in those desperate years. It was also
extraordinarily confident. By sailing his squadrons directly at the enemy line,
Nelson, like Duncan before him, was gambling that his ships could survive continuous
raking. They did, and proceeded to mangle the enemy. At Trafalgar, for at least twenty
minutes at the opening of the battle, the British ships could not fire a single shot, while a
dozen of the enemy could fire at will. Nelson knew that, risked that and was certain he could
win despite that. It was not until the Royal Navy fought the U.S. Navy in the war of 1812 that
British gunnery met its equal, but the U.S. Navy did not deploy battleships and so could
only be a minor nuisance to a worldwide fleet which was by then globally preeminent.

Did any man serve at both Trafalgar and Waterloo? I know of only one. Don Miguel Ricardo
Maria Juan de la Mata Domingo Vincente Ferre Alava de Esquivel, mercifully known as
Miguel de Alava, was an officer in the Spanish navy in 1805 and served aboard the Spanish
admiral’s flagship, the Principe de Asturias. That ship fought nobly at Trafalgar and,
though she was hurt badly, managed to avoid capture and escaped back to Cadiz. Four years
later Alava had become an officer in the Spanish army. Spain had changed sides by then, and
the Spanish army was allied with the British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future
Duke of Wellington, as it fought in the Peninsula, and General de Alava was appointed
Wellington’s Spanish liaison officer and the two became extremely close friends, a
friendship that endured till their deaths. De Alava stayed with Wellington until the end of
the Peninsular War when he was appointed the Spanish ambassador to the Netherlands and so
was able to join the allies at the Battle of Waterloo where he remained at Wellington’s
side throughout the day. He had no need to be there, yet his presence was undoubtedly a help
to Wellington who trusted de Alava’s judgment and valued his advice. Nearly all of
Wellington’s aides were killed or wounded, yet he and de Alava survived unhurt. So Miguel de
Alava fought against the British at Trafalgar and for them at Waterloo, a strange career
indeed. Sharpe joins de Alava in surviving that remarkable double.

I am enormously grateful to Peter Goodwin, the Historical Consultant, Keeper and
Curator of HMS Victory, for his notes on the manuscript, and to Katy Ball, Curator at
Portsmouth Museums and Records Office. The errors which survive are all my own, or can be
blamed on Richard Sharpe, a soldier adrift in a strange nautical world. He will be back on
land soon, where he belongs, and will march again.