Men of Honour (3 page)

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, a perfectly legitimate description.

The language and perception was shared by the French. ‘The sea must become free like the land,' the revolutionary zealot André Jeanbon Saint-André had told the French fleet in Brest in January 1794.

Deploy therefore all the force and power which the People, whom you have the honour to represent, can give to exterminate the most miserable of its enemies, the speculators of London, the oppressors of Bengal, the disturbers of public peace in Europe. Ships, cannon, sailors: such must be your rallying cry.

Far more than any war of the 18th century, this was a triangular, ideological conflict. A post-revolutionary, authoritarian regime in France, profoundly subversive of all the accepted nostrums of pre-modern European society, was allied in Spain with the most conservative and backward of all the European powers, the trailing partner in the alliance, against a Britain which already embodied a distinctly modern Atlanticist set of values—commercial, libertarian, amoral and aggressive—but which remained, nevertheless, dressed in some very old-fashioned ‘King and Country', monarchist 18th-century Establishment clothes.

Spain was the poorest, weakest, most inefficient and most antique of the three. It remained in 1805 a profoundly conservative country. The radical changes that had already occurred further north in Europe scarcely impinged, except in the most superficial of ways, on the style, thinking and government of the country. Spain was without a middle class. Enormous armies of desperately poor landless peasants languished at the bottom of society. A hereditary aristocracy remained, at least in theory, the dominant class, motivated by little except a kind of piety towards the crown, its institutions and the Roman church. The Spanish navy was officered by those aristocrats and manned by those peasants—a plebeian/patrician polarity on which the working of modern, high technology men-of-war, with highly complex systems of both sailing and fighting the vessels, could not easily rely.

On top of that, the Spanish aristocracy had learned to exist in a kind of dependency culture. Spain itself, scarcely
developed from its own medieval poverty, had relied for two and a half centuries on the wealth it had extracted from the New World. Six or eight generations of its leading families had come to understand that no effort was required in order to enjoy the fruits of life. They had become indolent. Work was anathema to them. The hereditary offices which they still held were performed for them by low-grade administrative clerks. Unlike in England, the aristocracy was still difficult to penetrate. Soldiers, bankers and lawyers had yet to enter its ranks. It had become, in a word, effete.

Spain had lagged behind. Professional people were still miserably paid and of low standing, treated as minor functionaries. The productive cycle which had been developing in Britain for a century or more between higher growth, better standards of living, rising expectations, a hunger for world markets and a burgeoning economy had scarcely begun in Spain. Disease still reigned: although plague had finally disappeared in the 1720s, ‘flu, smallpox, typhoid, dysentery and malaria continued to sweep through the country. Deeply symptomatic of a country going nowhere, of opportunities scarcely presenting themselves to Spanish youth, almost a quarter of Spaniards simply never married. There was no future for them to look forward to. As a result of high death rates and a low birth rate, the population of Spain had increased by little more than half during the century. In the same period, the number of English had doubled. The two countries were not even in the same arena. In the light of this, Nelson's famous insult to the Spanish has often been misinterpreted as pure racism. ‘The Dons may make fine ships,' he wrote in 1793, ‘—they cannot however make men.' But this is not, as it might sound, a reflection on Spanish virility. It is a description of a demographic fact. The supply of good, strong, well-fed men, with a high level of ambition and enterprise, was simply absent. ‘They have four first-rates in commission
at Cadiz,' Nelson went on, ‘and very fine ships, but shockingly manned. I am certain if our six barges' crews, who are picked men, had got on board one of them, they would have taken her.' He was probably right.

Navies reflect the societies from which they come and at Cadiz in October 1805, Villeneuve, the French commander, was in despair about his Spanish allies. Their ships were in such poor condition, he reported to his friend Denis Decrès, Minister of Marine in Paris, that they should never have been sent to sea. Scurvy and dysentery were rife. One of the disadvantages from which Spain suffered, compared with its northern rivals, was the ability of tropical and Caribbean diseases to survive in the homeland. Yellow fever, which would habitually kill up to twenty per cent a year of the naval manpower of all nations when stationed in the Caribbean, could not survive the cold of southern England. In Spain it felt at home and Cadiz itself had been subject to a yellow fever epidemic that had been raging across the whole of southern Spain since the spring. More than a quarter of the thirty-six thousand people in Malaga, for example, had died of the sickness. With social systems collapsing across the whole of southern Spain, there was no food in Cadiz and few stores for refitting the ships. There was little money with which to pay crews, or any bounty for those who might be persuaded to volunteer. The people on board the Spanish ships, Villeneuve told Decrès, were ridiculous. Barely ten per cent were sailors. ‘It is truly painful to see such strong and beautiful ships manned with shepherds and beggars, and to have such a tiny number of real seamen. The fleet is not in a state to perform the services appointed to it. The Spanish are quite incapable of meeting the enemy.' Intriguingly, the percentage of qualified seamen on British ships, when first leaving port, might not on occasions have been a great deal higher. The Spanish rarely put large fleets to sea but the British blue
seas policy, pursued since the early 18th century, by which fleets were kept for years at a time blockading the ports of continental Europe, transformed those incompetent landmen into effective and coherent crews. On both sides, policy reinforced demography.

In common with other European navies, the Spanish had more ships than they could man. Unavailability of skilled labour, rather than the lack of funds, limited the effectiveness and power of their navy. Like the French, the government had for fifty years organised a register of all acknowledged seamen, on whom the state could call in time of war. But, inevitably, in Spain as in France, the state did not have the mechanisms to enforce the scheme. The demands made by the register could be all too easily cheated. Poorly paid officials depended on bribes as an essential part of their income, and repeatedly the men did not appear. The savage discipline habitual in all navies—fifty strokes while lashed to a cannon for the first attempt to desert; consignment to the galleys for the second—did little to encourage subscription.

Vice-Admiral Jose de Mazarredo wrote to the King in May 1801, describing his predicament when finding himself at sea with no more than sixty sailors with any experience out of a crew of five hundred, the rest being fishermen and off coasting vessels ‘without training or any understanding whatsoever of a ship's rigging or routine on board, such as securing a topgallant sail to the yardarm or taking in a reef.' It was a stumbling, untrained mass of ill-assorted peasantry with which the aristocrats of the Spanish officer class put to sea in October 1805. Spanish gun crews were able to fire one round every five minutes from each of their 32lb cannon. Most British crews could manage a round every ninety seconds. The best could reduce that time by a third.

The Spanish commander, Vice-Admiral Federico Carlos Gravina, was a Sicilian, and spoke a strongly accented
Italian as his mother tongue—a trait he had in common with Napoleon—but his father, the Duke of San Miguel, was a Spanish grandee of the first class, as was his mother's father. Gravina inherited the right on both his mother's and his father's side, to wear his hat in the presence of the King. He was, in many ways, an antique himself, laden with a sense of honour, duty and a particularly Spanish form of fatalism. ‘There are disasters that may be honoured as victory,' the 19th-century Spanish nationalist Manuel Marliani later wrote of Trafalgar. It was a catastrophically self-fulfilling frame of mind.

Threads and fragments of the European Enlightenment had found their way into Spain. The Spanish navy had conducted long exploratory scientific voyages through the Pacific, which bear comparison with those of James Cook on behalf of the British Admiralty; and there was, for example, a modern and efficiently run meteorological observatory outside Cadiz. But these were superficial changes. The traditional structures remained in place. Of the two hundred and twenty-seven ships built for the Spanish Royal Navy in the eighteenth century, a third of them had been named after saints, others after the Mother of Christ, several after key elements of church doctrine: the Spanish Royal Navy was proud of nothing more than the
Salvador del Mundo
, and the
Purísima Concepción
. Here at Trafalgar, the
Santísima Trinidad
, the largest ship in the world, was the flagship of Rear-Admiral don Bernardo Hidalgo Cisneros, the
Santa Ana
carried the flag of Vice-Admiral don Ignacio Maria de Alava. In the Spanish fleet, Catholicism and aristocracy clasped each other in an embrace of pure retrospection.

The Spanish hierarchy had been exposed to, and clearly knew about, more modern approaches to war—and life—but didn't take them up. After the execution of Louis XVI, Spain had been briefly allied with Britain against France.
Gravina had visited Portsmouth in 1793 and had been introduced there to the extraordinarily beneficial effects that citrus juice could have on the health of sailors. The British sailors were known as ‘limeys' for the very reason that they drank citrus juice drinks. Nelson would sip lemonade as he died. But Gravina ignored the advice. It was not what the Spaniards did. Lime and lemon juice was never introduced to the Spanish fleet and scurvy continued its wild career among their sad, impoverished crews.

There was one final element in Spanish naval tradition that would on the day secure their defeat. The navy itself, despite playing the essential role in the creation and maintenance of the Spanish overseas empire, on whose income the Spanish state itself relied, was not regarded, as it was in England, as ‘the first service'. The theatre in which true nobility in Spanish arms could be enacted was on land. Seamanship, the handling and running of a ship, was considered secondary to the fighting that could be done once the sailors had manoeuvred the warriors into position. The captain of a Spanish ship did not concern himself with sailing matters. That was the business of a junior officer, the pilot, to whom all aspects of seamanship were delegated. The captain was in charge of the soldiers on board, of whom there were inordinate numbers. As a result, the Spanish men-of-war at Trafalgar were not ships but floating fortresses, castles in transit, commanded by a clique of officers for whom victory might have been preferable but who considered nothing more honourable than an exceptionally bloody defeat. On 20 October, Gravina listed the men on board his flagship, the
Principe de Asturias
: Infantry troops 382; marine artillerymen 172; officers and men 609. Even nominally, without taking into account the goatherds and the sweepings of Cadiz, almost half the men on board the Spanish flagship at Trafalgar were not seamen.