"Kiss me, Hardy." Trafalgar, Oct. 21, 1805

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Two hundred years ago today, off the coast of Spain a fleet of French and Spanish numbering 33 capital ships and carrying nearly 2700 naval guns was en route to Britian as a prelude to an invasion by Napolean (not present). In overall command was French Admiral Villeneuve, a young, dedicated, but inexperienced commander. In point of fact, the French officer corps had been seriously damaged by the aristocratic purges following the revolution. Commanding the Spanish was Adm. Gravina, a senior naval officer. Among the ships of the combined fleet was the 140 gun Santisima Trinidad, the largest warship afloat with four complete covered gun decks. This was truly an enormous force and 2700 guns firing a broad side every four minutes would have been awesome if it was not for the fact that British gunners did it in half the time.

On the 20th, the previous day, the British Mediterranean fleet sighted the allied force. Its commander, Lord Nelson, was entertaining some of the fleet captains where he detailed his plan of action, characterized as the “Nelson touch.” Nelson was an experienced and aggressive naval officer and had the wounds to prove it. His kidney was damaged in a fleet action off Cape St. Vincent, he lost the use of an eye in a land assault on Calvie, he lost an arm in another amphibious assault at Tenerife. He suffered brain damage after being grazed with shrapnel at the Nile. Finally, he suffered reoccurring bouts of malaria resulting from a land assault in Nicaragua. It was during a delirious fever returning home from Nicaragua as a young man that he decided to become a hero and to command the English fleet. Nelson was idolized by his men and the nation. His superior officers considered him a loose cannon. He was born the son of a local pastor and joined the navy when he was twelve. His lordship was the result of his victory at the Nile.

On paper, the odds against a British victory were long. In ships of the line, they were outnumbered by five. Among these ships was the 64 gun Agamemnon, Nelson’s first ship after becoming a captain at age twenty. These odds were considerably exacerbated by the fact that British warships were generally smaller and less powerful than French and especially Spanish ships. England’s largest ship, Victory, carried 110 guns with three covered decks. Consequently, they boasted a 500 gun and roughly 800 man advantage over the British. Since Napoleon’s goal was to invade the sceptered isle, the allies had only to reach England for success while Nelson was forced to define victory as the complete destruction of the enemy.

To effectuate that destruction, Nelson divided his fleet into two parts. With the enemy in line of battle, Nelson’s column’s would approach in a perpendicular direction, engaging the line in two places. This was a risky move since it would expose the entire British fleet to fire from the entire allied armada during the approach while the British could not return fire. Remember that in those days, ships were entirely dependant on wind, so options for maneuvering were extremely limited. In fact, Nelson counted on that fact. While his ships engaged one after the other, more distant allied ships would not be able intercept.

At dawn on October 21, 1805, Nelson wrote a brief prayer, now read from the deck of his ship every year on the anniversary, and donned his best scarlet coat and cocked hat. When asked by a staff officer to wear something less conspicuous, Nelson responded, “This is no time to be shifting coats.” The order was clear for action: removal of all materials not necessary for fighting. Hit by a cannon ball, a table could produce a hail of lethal missiles of wood. Below, ‘powder monkeys’, preteen boys, were bringing gunpowder from the magazines and stacking 32 pound solid balls of iron. Surgeons in the cockpit laid out their gruesome instruments in order to rid wounded men of their shattered limbs. The ship’s chaplain prepared for those who were beyond the help of primitive surgery. Nelson toured each of the cramped gun decks, his arrival announced by the cheers from the previous stop. His two lines constituted a vanguard, commanded by Nelson himself and headed by HMS Victory, and a rear guard down wind commanded by his childhood friend, Admiral Collingwood on board Royal Sovereign. The wind was light and the enemy ships were silhouetted to the east. In the light breeze, Royal Sovereign got ahead of Victory. “Look how Collingwood takes his ship into battle! How I envy him,” Nelson said to his flag captain, Sir Thomas Hardy, another personal friend. In fact almost all of the British captains that day were personal friends of Nelson.

When the British were spotted, it took little time for the allies to begin raining speeding, iron balls into the British ships, especially the two leaders, Victory and Royal Sovereign. At that range, 19th century cannon fire was not especially accurate, but there was plenty of it. Like the British, the allies shot solid iron projectiles. Exploding shells were still in the future. Their aim was to touch off the cannon’s vent hole while pointed roughly at the rigging in order to disable the enemy and allow it to be boarded by their superior man power. A gunshot could make a man deaf for life, despite the wax earplugs they wore. Accuracy with a black powder cannon from the pitching deck of a ship was no small task. As the morning wore on and the damaged English ships became close, the Spanish and French sailors instantly discovered by the British appeared so confident.

When Victory approached the French ships, it fired its two large carronades across the weather deck of the enemy vessels. These horrible weapons were essentially giant shotguns hurling several hundred musket balls at super-sonic speed. Below deck, Victory and R.S. gun crews raked the nearest enemy ships end-to-end with precision artillery delivered by highly trained crews using flint-lock ignition. These cannonballs traveled across the length of the ship, dismounting guns and shattering wood and men. While the British men hoped to take prizes back to Portsmith for monetary rewards, the seriousness of the occasion caused them to aim for destruction, not capture. They concentrated fire on enemy hulls hoping to score shots below the water line. A round shot on a wooden ship caused the inside wall to erupt with a lethal spray of splinters known as a slaughtering shot.

On the quarter deck of the victory, Nelson paced with Hardy until a splinter of something knocked Hardy’s belt buckle from his shoe. “This is too warm work to last long,” Nelson observed with a grim smile. After pacing some more, Hardy turned to ask Nelson something and observed that he was on the floor. He had been shot by a rifleman from the rigging of Redoutable, a French ship along side. Once below, the surgeon pronounced it fatal. The 0.17 caliber conical projectile had cut through his right lung and broken his back. Hardy, now effectively the fleet commander, visited when he could. “Kiss me, Hardy,” Nelson asked and his friend kissed him on his soot-covered cheek. After three hours of agony, Nelson announced, “Thank God I have done my duty” and expired at the age of forty-five.

Meanwhile the holocaust outside had become pell-mell with ships seeking enemy vessels to fight. Victory was dismasted and Santisima Trinidad was on fire. Admiral Gravina had been killed. At the end of the day, most of the allied fleet was destroyed or captured. The British had not lost a single vessel. The message that reached London days later was an expression of grief for the loss of the popular admiral adding as an afterthought the annihilation of the enemy fleet. Nelson’s physician noted of the hero of Trafalgar in his diary, “When I think of what a funny little man he was, I become stupid with grief.” Nelson was returned to England by his crew on his ship despite attempts to return him on a faster, undamaged vessel. Following an enormous state funeral, men from his ship interred the fighting admiral and before an astonished crowd ripped apart the Union Jack that covered his coffin and divided the pieces among themselves. Nelson rests in a casket made from the ruins of a French ship he destroyed at the Nile in warriors crypt under St. Paul’s Cathedral near the remains of the Duke of Wellington, T.E. Laurence and Winston Churchill. Victory remains dry-docked in Portsmith where a memorial service is said to Nelson’s “immortal memory” every year.