Trafalgar: A Predestined Victory

At nearly half past noon during the 21 October 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, HMS Victory approached the enemy's battle line directly astern of the Bucentaure, French Vice Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve's flagship. The Victory's captain, Thomas Hardy, adjusted course and closed to 50 yards then 40 . . . 20 . . . 5. The flagship's stern tricolor was almost close enough for some of the British three-decker's gunners to reach out and grab when Bosun William Willmet fired the Victory's massive 68-pounder port forecastle carronade, which had been loaded with a roundshot and 500 musket balls. In a terrible instant the balls swept away most of the Bucentaure's stem.

The carronade's blast was the signal for the 50 guns of the Victory's port broadside to begin raking the enemy two-decker, and before the echo of the 68-pounder "smasher" had died away the first set of cannons to bear on the Bucentaure's stern belched fire and metal. As the Victory slowly sailed past the stricken French vessel, gun captains patiently awaited their opportunity, aligned their cannons, and fired. Most of the Victory's guns were triple-shotted, with the large 32-pounders capable of hurling 96 pounds of metal, and each successive blast tore deep into the helpless flagship. Then the British man-of-war turned to find a new victim, leaving hundreds of sailors on the fiucentaure dead or dying, dozens of the ship's guns overturned, and what was left of her stern caved in by more than 100 British cannonballs. HMS Victory, Vice Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson's flagship, had emphatically broken the enemy's line of battle.

An Improbable Triumph?

Two hundred years ago this month, a British fleet commanded by Admiral Lord Nelson confronted Villeneuve's Franco-Spanish Combined Fleet about 20 miles off the Atlantic coast of Spain. The resulting Battle of Trafalgar was the most decisive naval combat since Salamis, and in many ways the British victory was just as improbable as the Greek triumph almost 2,300 years before. The Franco-Spanish fleet had more, larger, and often better-constructed ships than its opponent. It also had considerably more and heavier guns than the British. If calculations of potential firepower were all that mattered, the French and Spanish must surely have had the better of it.

It is often assumed that the British captains at Trafalgar were a seasoned group of veterans with long experience serving under Lord Nelson. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only a third of Nelson's 27 ship-of-the-line captains who fought that day had previously served with the admiral, and only five of them had ever fought in a major fleet action. The real battle-tested veterans of the Royal Navy were hundreds of miles north blockading the French port of Brest and guarding the English Channel.

The Combined Fleet had one more significant advantage, one that Nelson presented almost as a gift. Rather than sail his ships in a parallel line to the French and Spanish in order to exchange broadsides, he broke his fleet into two columns and charged directly into the Combined Fleet's guns so as to break its line. That meant that for torturously long minutes the British vessels were exposed to repeated French and Spanish broadsides with little more than a handful of bow guns able to return fire.

When the battle was over, however, 17 of 33 French and Spanish ships of the line were in British hands and another had blown up. All but four of the prizes would soon be lost in a storm, which also sank several of the badly battered Franco-Spanish ships that had escaped toward Cadiz. The British lost 441 killed in the battle compared with nearly 2,500 French and Spanish battle deaths. Moreover, during the almost five hours of fighting not a single British ship was sunk or forced to strike its colors. Given the disadvantages under which the British fought, how can their decisive victory be explained?

The Nelson Touch

The effect Nelson had on his officers and men is impossible to overestimate. His annihilation of the French Mediterranean fleet at the 1798 Battle of the Nile had made him a national hero, while his shattering of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1801 made him a legend. When he rejoined his fleet off Cadiz in late-September 1805, every British sailor was sure of two things: Decisive, violent action would soon ensue, and victory was assured. Nelson inspired fervent loyalty from both officers and seamen. When news of his death during the Battle of Trafalgar spread among the fleet, even hard-bitten sailors broke down and wept unashamedly.

Outwardly, Nelson was far from impressive in appearance or manner. It is often hard to determine what it was about him that inspired such devotion. A small, frail man with a weak constitution, he was prone to seasickness, often ravaged by disease, known to be petty and capricious, and given to suicidal fits of depression. He was also well known for playing favorites, and all of the captains at Trafalgar who had previously fought with him were present because he had specifically requested them.

So what did Nelson have that made men pray for the chance to follow him into battle? First and foremost, he was a fighter. When he was asked to present a testament of his service to the Admiralty in order to obtain a pension, he wrote:

Your memorialist has been in four actions with the fleets of the enemy, in three actions with frigates, in six engagements with batteries, in ten actions in boats employed in cutting out of harbours, in destroying vessels, and in taking three towns. He has assisted in the capture of seven sail of the line, six frigates, four corvettes, eleven privateers of different sizes, and taken or destroyed nearly fifty merchantmen. He has actually been engaged against the enemy upwards of 120 times and has lost his right eye and arm, and has been severely wounded and bruised in his body.

Nelson was just 39 when he penned this, and his great battles of the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar were all before him.

Nelson may have played favorites, but an individual became a favorite only when he proved himself incredibly competent and brave. When Nelson admitted an officer into his "band of brothers," he was given the admiral's unquestioning loyalty. In 1797 Nelson, in the frigate La Minerve, was compelled to flee before a sizable Spanish force. But during the escape, lieutenant Thomas Hardy and a rescue party set out from the frigate in a small boat to save a sailor who had fallen overboard. After the search for the seaman proved futile, Nelson saw the boat's crew rowing hard to catch up to La Minerve while the Spanish ships bore down. Exclaiming, "By God I will not lose Hardy," Nelson quickly ordered the topsails backed to slow the frigate. The Spanish, sure they were sailing into a trap, turned and fled. (In addition to serving as Nelson's flag captain at Trafalgar, Hardy later became first sea lord.) Such devotion to his officers and men was returned ten times over.

Nelson also trusted his captains, and they trusted him. In his written instructions prior to Trafalgar he told them, "no Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy." When the time came, that is exactly what most of them did.

Courage and Confidence

Fleet engagements, however, are not won by admirals or captains. Once they have done their part and put their ships in contact with the enemy, the decision lies in the hands of the sailors who handle the guns. Under Nelson these men thought themselves invincible. As one young sailor wrote, "The presence of such a man inspires everyone with additional confidence." For the most part, the "iron men" at Trafalgar were long-serving veterans inured to hardship and toil. In peacetime they were a dangerous lot who were often kept on board ship when in port. In war they were demons. They were not men easily impressed by rank or flash, but they loved Nelson.

The contrast with the Combined Fleet is stark. Napoleon did not trust Admiral Villeneuve, and his relief orders were en route when he sailed out of Cadiz. Furthermore, the admiral was incredibly pessimistic of his chances against Nelson, a fatalistic infection that soon spread through his entire fleet. His captains' feelings for him ran the gamut from mistrust to overt loathing. In the midst of the battle, one Spanish captain read the orders from the flagship and announced that the fleet was doomed because "our admiral does not know his business." The Franco-Spanish fleet was also sorely undermanned, and many of its sailors were new to their jobs and untrained, having recently been forcibly conscripted from local army garrisons. These men were no match for Nelson's old salts.

Bravery was the single-most common characteristic among the officers of Nelson's fleet, and it was present in equal measure among his crews. Once a ship was engaged, captains had little to do except pace the quarterdeck under fire, so as to inspire the crew. Nelson's plan for victory-breaking the enemy's line to bring on a closeaction melee-was based on his officers' and men's courage. In the van of the two British divisions, the harrowing experience of enduring enemy broadsides while approaching the Franco-Spanish line required nerves of steel, but Nelson's men did not let him down. Every ship flew as much sail as could be raised. There were several attempts by British vessels to overtake the Victory, which was leading the weather column, and HMS Royal Sovereign, at the head of the lee column, so that they could absorb some of the fire being directed at the two flagships. At one point during the approach, Nelson's longserving (some say long-suffering) secretary John Scott was killed by cannon shot. A Marine officer and a seaman tried to drag the body away. However, the admiral saw them and asked, "Is that poor Scott that is gone?" Told it was, he said, "Poor fellow," and returned to pacing with Captain Hardy.

While Nelson lay mortally wounded by a sniper's bullet during the battle, the admiral asked Hardy if any of the British ships had struck their colors. When the captain assured him that none had, he rested easier. Nelson should never have been in doubt; his captains did not consider surrender an option. Each knew that if his ship found herself hard-pressed, the next ship in line would soon sail to her aid.

On the other hand, hard-pressed French and Spanish captains could not be sure any other ship would assist them. Many of these commanders were ready to strike their colors as soon as they had convinced themselves that they had fought long enough to save their personal honor. Unfortunately, even a ten-minute duel at close range with a British ship could have devastating consequences.

The Deciding Factor

To understand why this was so, one must analyze the final major element of British success: gunnery. The most important difference between the two fleets was doctrinal. British captains trained their gun crews to fire rapidly and not to worry much about accuracy because they counted on firing at ranges at which it would be impossible to miss their targets. French crews were trained to take careful aim and fire slowly, as befits a navy that made it a practice to fight from a distance and retreat to safety whenever possible.

Even worse was the French policy of aiming for masts and rigging in order to hamper the enemy's sailing ability. British doctrine, on the other hand, called for aiming at the hull of enemy ships to cause as much death and destruction as possible. One French captain complained after the battle, "An English shot would kill twenty of our men; a French shot in return would cut a hole in a sail." The poor accuracy of the undertrained Franco-Spanish gun crews also reduced the effectiveness of the Combined Fleet's fire; they sent a significant number of rounds clear over the British fleet.

Moreover, British gun crews loaded and fired much faster than their French or Spanish counterparts. According to studies of rates of fire from other engagements, Franco-Spanish gunners could fire on average one round every six minutes. This, however, was with well-trained crews, which Admiral Villeneuve did not have at Trafalgar. British gun crews were markedly superior. The ships of Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood's lee column, for instance, fired their first three broadsides within just over three minutes, with a sustained rate of fire of one round every two minutes.

Assuming a pair of British and French 100-gun ships were exchanging broadsides, at any given moment 50 guns are engaged on each ship. In a ten-minute battle the French would get off two broadsides (assuming the guns were preloaded). The British would get off six. Over the next hour, the French would be lucky to get off ten more broadsides while the British would deliver 30. During the first ten minutes, the French ship could expect to absorb 300 rounds into its hull, while the British would only have to endure 100 rounds, and most of those would pass through sails and rigging. Because the British habitually double- and triple-shotted their guns, the French ship would actually be struck by 600 to 900 rounds. Also, British rounds were killing men and wrecking guns, assuring that each successive French broadside would be weaker than the previous.

At Trafalgar, the carnage inflicted by the terrible broadsides of a British ship was more than often enough to decide a duel. Writing after the battle, the acting captain of the Bellerophon, First Lieutenant William Cumby, told of his engagement with the French Aigle: "Our fire was so hot that we soon drove them from the lower decks, after which our people took the quoins out and elevated their guns, so as to tear their decks and sides to pieces. When she got clear of us and did not return a single shot while we raked her; her starboard side was entirely beaten in."

The Aigle lost more than two-thirds of her crew killed and wounded and was captured. This was a story repeated in many particulars throughout the engagement. For instance, when the Royal Sovereign faced eight enemy vessels she inflicted double her own losses on the massive Spanish ship the Santa Ana and punished most of the other seven vessels equally hard. The Colossus, which engaged in a long fight against three enemy ships and suffered the highest number of British losses that day (40 killed, 160 wounded), still managed to inflict almost three times as many casualties on the enemy.

The battle itself was almost anti-climactic, since the outcome had been decided the moment the Victory and the Royal Sovereign pierced the French line. In the general melee that followed, the French could not match British confidence and gunnery. As rapidly as possible British captains would successively close on an enemy ship and wait until she was just yards away to unleash yet another devastating broadside.

In a single afternoon the Royal Navy put a definitive end to any hope Napoleon had to invade England and assured Great Britain's naval supremacy for the next century. While this newly won dominance of the seas ensured that Britain would not lose the war, there would be another dozen years of hard fighting on the Continent before it was won and Napoleon finally deposed.

In England, news of the victory at Trafalgar set off jubilation and general rejoicing, which was almost immediately subdued by the announcement of Lord Nelson's death. To the country, his life seemed a particularly heavy price to pay even for so great a triumph. Nelson, though, had seemed to know that this battle would be his last and told many of his captains that they would not see him alive again. He died knowing he had won a great victory and not a single British ship had struck. It was how he most wanted to go.