Men of Honour (26 page)

But there is one further and governing point which emerges from Pierre Servaux's words: a deep, inbuilt sense of inferiority. They were not ‘disheartened' by the brutal aggression. They could show the Englishmen that they had guns too. That is the language of defeat, of keeping one's end up, of showing the better man that you are a man too. In that innermost, erosive doubt much of the outcome of Trafalgar is decided.

Collingwood was many minutes ahead of the next ship
behind him, the
Belleisle.
Gathering to the aid of the
Santa Ana
, French and Spanish ships clustered like wasps around the intruder: the
Fougueux
raked the
Royal Sovereign
from astern; the
San Leandro
from ahead; the
San Justo
was cannonading her from 300 yards off her starboard bow; the
Indomptable
from off her starboard quarter. Shots were perfectly visible as they came towards the men on board, at least from the upper decks, and in these few minutes, so many were being fired at the
Royal Sovereign
that the crew frequently saw shots from different ships collide, or glance off each other, as if in a game of demonic aerial billiards. But the
Royal Sovereign
stuck to her guns. Once past the stern of the
Santa Ana
, Collingwood turned hard to port and ranged his ship right alongside the Spanish flagship.

Muzzle to muzzle for about two hours they fired man-killing shots into each other's bellies. The British fired perhaps eighty broadsides in that time, the Spanish perhaps twenty-five or thirty. The aim was not to sink the other ship but to kill the other crew, or at least enough of them for their officers to consider any continuation hopeless, and those mathematics are the facts on which victory was founded. By about 2.15, the officers of the
Santa Ana
decided to surrender. Her starboard side, next to the
Sovereign
's guns, had been ‘very nearly beaten in' by the shot fired into it. Nearly all her officers were dead or wounded and they surrendered, as was the convention, by hauling down her flag. At almost the same moment, the mizzenmast on the
Royal Sovereign
collapsed, shot through by the fire of the five ships which had surrounded her. A few minutes later, the mainmast followed, leaving only the foremast standing, and that, as the expression of the time had it, ‘tottering and wounded'. Records and figures of dead and wounded on French and Spanish ships are sketchy, but on the British ships exact. There were 47 men
dead on the
Sovereign
and 95 wounded, half of them severely, out of a ship's company of about 600. The Spanish had inflicted casualties at a rate of about 25%; the British had probably killed or wounded about 50% of the enemy. That is the winning difference.

The
Belleisle
strode in after the
Royal Sovereign
, through the same gap Collingwood had entered, and the
Belleisle
again savaged the
Santa Ana
from astern, another double-shotted load with a canister of grape shot on top of them. These methods of warfare do not aim at individual destruction; they make environments murderous. The air between decks in a well-raked ship was as unsurvivable as any No-Man's-Land over which machine guns played.

On all ships engaged in this form of brutal action, winning or losing, the damage was horrifying. ‘I now went below,' Samuel Leech wrote of his encounter with a heavily armed American frigate in 1812, after his own outgunned ship had surrendered,

to see how matters appeared there. The first object I met was a man bearing a limb, which had just been detached from some suffering wretch. Pursuing my way to the ward-room, I necessarily passed through the steerage, which was strewed with the wounded: it was a sad spectacle, made more appalling by the groans and cries which rent the air. Some were groaning, others were swearing most bitterly, a few were praying, while those last arrived were begging most piteously to have their wounds dressed next. The surgeon and his mate were smeared with blood from head to foot: they looked more like butchers than doctors.

Here the sea was full of the bodies of scorched, butchered and mangled people. On board the defeated ships, the scene confronting the British officers was one of cinematic horror.
A British midshipman went on board the
Santísima Trinidad
:

She had between 3 and 400 killed and wounded, her Beams where coverd with Blood, Brains, and pieces of Flesh, and the after part of her Decks with wounded, some without Legs and some without an Arm; what calamities War brings on, and what a number of Lives where put an end to on the 21st.

The companionway steps, leading down from deck to deck, were in the most brutalised ships so covered in blood that you could hardly walk on them without slipping. Nor is the sense of revulsion a modern reaction. ‘Such was the horror that filled' the mind of the chaplain on board the
Victory
, the Rev. Dr Scott,

that it haunted him like a shocking dream for years afterwards. He never talked of it. Indeed the only record of a remark on the subject was one extorted from him by the inquiries of a friend, soon after his return home. The expression that escaped him at the moment was, ‘it was like a butcher's shambles.'

Lieutenant William Ram of the
Victory
was brought down into the cockpit where the surgeons were working on the wounded. Ram was not aware as he was carried down below quite how desperate his condition was. The surgeon looked at him and the young man was told the seriousness of his wound.

On discovering it, he tore off with his own hand the ligatures that were being applied, and bled to death. Almost frenzied by the sight of this, Scott hurried wildly to the deck for relief, perfectly regardless of his own safety. He rushed up the companion-ladder, now slippery with gore, to the scene above [where] all was noise, confusion, and smoke.

On board the
Leviathan
,

a shot took off the arm of Thomas Main, when at his gun on the forecastle; his messmates kindly offered to assist him in going to the Surgeon; but he bluntly said, ‘I thank you stay where you are; you will do more good there:' he then went down by himself to the cockpit. The Surgeon (who respected him) would willingly have attended him, in preference to others whose wounds were less alarming; but Main would not admit of it, saying ‘Avast, not until it come to my turn if you please.' The Surgeon soon after amputated the shattered part of the arm, near the shoulder; during which, with great composure, smiling, and with a clear steady voice, he sang the whole of ‘Rule Britannia'.

A note survives on Thomas Main, written by his captain, Henry Bayntun, dated December 1st 1805, Plymouth:

I am sorry to inform you, that the above-mentioned fine fellow died since writing the above, At Gibraltar Hospital, of a fever he caught, when the stump of his arm was nearly well. H.B.

In an area of sea about one and a half miles long and half a mile wide, a series of individual ship-actions developed in which the brutal facts were laid out: if one ship in the encounter could kill more of the people on the other, the victory went to them. The ships of each fleet manoeuvred into contact with their enemy. Each attempted to find those positions ahead or astern from which they could inflict ultimate damage and have none or little done to them in return. It was like a wrestling match, close to and sweaty, in which each was looking to turn the other.

Astern of Collingwood, the
Belleisle
found herself
embroiled with crowds of French and Spanish ships coming on to her as the rear of the Combined Fleet sailed up into the battle. The
San Juan Nepomuceno
, the
Fougueux
, the French
Achille
, the
Aigle
, the
San Justo
and the
San Leandro
and the French
Neptune
all attacked her one after another. Her masts fell in a vast tangle of rigging, sails and spars which blocked her gunports and prevented her from either manoeuvring or firing in her own defence. Only when ships in Collingwood's column crowded into the same mêlée, was she saved from utter destruction. Of all the British ships, she was the most horrifically damaged. All three masts and bowsprit had been shot away. Her hull was ‘knocked almost to pieces'. The only place they could raise an ensign on board was on the end of pike held aloft. Without her rig above her, the body of the mauled
Belleisle
rolled like a hog in the swell. But here is a strange and significant fact. No ship in the British fleet should have been more murderously treated and yet, at the end of the battle, out of her crew of 750, only thirty-one of her men were dead and 93 wounded. Here too is one of the governing facts of Trafalgar. The captains and gunners of the Combined Fleet failed in the one essential: killing large numbers of the enemy.

The
Polyphemus
came to the
Belleisle
's rescue, then the
Defiance
, the
Tonnant
and the
Swiftsure.
The crews of each ship cheered as the others came past and drove into the fighting. The
Mars
, miscalculating a manoeuvre, suddenly found herself stern on to the
Monarca
and the
Algésiras
and then bow-on to the
Pluton.
Captain Duff had allowed his ship to become caught in the most dangerous geometry which sailing battle could offer. It was then that a ball from the
Pluton
struck him on the chest, drove upwards, removed his head and left his trunk lying dead on the gangway just forward of the quarter-deck. The same shot scything through flesh, killed two seamen behind him.
The men of the
Mars
gathered the trunk of their dead captain, held it up and gave three cheers ‘to show they were not discouraged by it, and they returned to their guns'. Duff's first lieutenant, William Hennah, appalled at the death of a man he loved, instantly took over command. The ship then drifted out of the battle, all three of her masts still there but with not a single foot of standing rigging having survived the high-aimed and slashingly destructive fire that had been poured into her and killed and wounded 98 of her crew. If a single sail had been raised, the masts would have collapsed. In the ship's log, her master Thomas Cook wrote, in words thicker with emotion than most logs allow for, ‘Poop and Quarter Deck almost destitute the carnage was so great.' Even so, none of the ships of the Combined Fleet attempted to take either the
Mars
or the
Belleisle
, one of the failures which measures the gap in morale between the two fleets.

How do men sustain this behaviour? Certainly, the culture of violence had by 1805 entered very deeply into the thinking of the British naval officer. It is true that in his famous prayer on the morning of Trafalgar, Nelson had prayed for the greatest ‘humanity' after the action, but humanity could only follow on from annihilation. Goodness depended on the riding and revelling. It is the paradox at the heart of moral war.

Sir Thomas Troubridge was not at Trafalgar but more strikingly than any other of Nelson's captains he personifies qualities in the British naval officer of the early 19th century which were so excitedly engaged with violence that they seem to border on the unhinged. Apart from a fit of jealousy and a falling-out towards the end of Nelson's life, Troubridge was always intimately close to Nelson. Nelson loved him as he loved others like him and did his best to promote him and reward him. They had been boys together on the
Seahorse
and as Nelson, favoured with
better connections in the high echelons of naval command, outstripped him in his career, he ensured that Troubridge kept step. St Vincent singled Troubridge out, as he did Nelson, for the aggressive fighting qualities he recognised in both. Both Nelson and St Vincent admired Troubridge for his extraordinary courage in the 1794 mutiny at Spithead when he had seized ten of the mutineers himself. Nelson made sure that Troubridge, who through sheer bad luck drove his ship aground before the Battle of the Nile, nevertheless received a gold medal as the other captains had. He procured him a baronetcy and persuaded Ferdinand King of Sicily to give him jewels, a pension and boxes of gold coins. For Nelson, Troubridge was ‘My honoured acquaintance of twenty-five years, and the very best sea-officer in His Majesty's service.'

In 1799, he was sent by Nelson to blockade the French in the city of Naples and to take the islands in the bay—Procida, Ischia and Capri—from the enemy. His task was ‘to extirpate the rebels' who had risen against the authority of the Sicilian Majesties, with whom Nelson was then obsessed. On Ischia, Troubridge found priests preaching revolt against the Sicilian kings. Sir Thomas summoned a judge and then wrote to Nelson. The judge

talks of it being necessary to have a bishop to degrade the priests, before he can execute them. I told him to hang them first, and if he did not think the degradation of hanging sufficient I would piss on the d-d jacobins carcass, and recommended him to punish the principal traitors the moment he passed sentence, no mass, no confession, but immediate death, hell was the proper place for them.

In a separate letter he added, ‘If we could muster a few thousand good soldiers, what a glorious massacre we should have…' and then apologised that he was unable to
send on to Nelson the head of a Jacobin which he had been sent by a Sicilian loyalist but which Troubridge feared he could not forward to Nelson as the weather was too hot and the head would rot on passage.

Nelson went about the task of executing rebels with equal relish. As he wrote to Captain Edward Foote of the frigate
Seahorse
‘the hanging of thirteen Jacobins gave us great pleasure: and the three priests [who had been sent to be degraded in Palermo] I hope return in the
Aurora
, to dangle on the tree best adapted to their weight of sins.' Perhaps they were brutalising conditions, but the brutality found ready candidates in these men. Perhaps it was of a piece with the necessarily aggressive constitution of a successful military man. Nelson knew this about himself and knew the man he was. He was not smooth. This was, for him, quite explicitly, a war on terror. As he told Sir John Acton, the Neapolitan prime minister, republicanism ‘is the system of
terror
, by which terror the French hold all Italy.' In those circumstances, ‘A fleet of British ships of war are the best negotiators in Europe; they always speak to be understood and generally gain their point.' His aggression was part of the new ‘unpoliteness'—a word used by Nelson in thanking the Lords of the Admiralty for sending ‘gentlemen to sea instead of dancing with nice white gloves.' It is a phrase that marks him out as part of the great revolution against politeness which swept Europe at the end of the 18th century. When a certain Mr Hill attempted to blackmail him in 1803, by threatening to publish a true account of what had gone wrong during a desperately unsuccessful raid led by Nelson on the French flotilla outside Boulogne, Nelson responded with almost Shakespearean grandeur: ‘I have not been brought up in the school of fear,' he wrote, ‘and therefore care not what you do. I defy you and your malice.'