Sharpe`s Trafalgar

Historical note

Sharpe really had no business being at Trafalgar, but he had to travel home from India and Cape Trafalgar lies not far from the route he would have taken and he might well have passed it on or about October 21, 1805. But if Sharpe had no business being there, then Admiral Villeneuve, commander of the combined French and Spanish fleets, had even less.

The great fleet had been gathered to cover the invasion of Britain, for which Napoleon had assembled his Grand Army near Boulogne. The British blockade and the weather combined to keep the enemy in port, except for a foray across the Atlantic by which Villeneuve hoped to draw Nelson away from the English coast. The foray failed, Villeneuve had put into Cadiz, and there he was trapped. Napoleon abandoned his invasion plans and marched his army east toward its great victory at Austerlitz. The French and Spanish fleet was now an irrelevance, but Napoleon, furious with Villeneuve, sent a replacement admiral and it seems likely that Villeneuve, knowing that he faced disgrace and eager to justify his existence before his replacement reached Cadiz, put to sea. Ostensibly he was taking the fleet to the Mediterranean, but he must have hoped he could fight the British ships blockading Cadiz, win a victory and so restore his reputation. After just a day at sea he discovered that the blockading fleet was much larger than he had thought and so turned his ships back northward in hope of escaping battle. It was already too late; Nelson was in sight and the combined fleet was doomed.

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.