Men of Honour (31 page)

Then, a moment of honour. The smallest battleship in the British fleet, the 65-gun
Africa
, captained by Henry Digby, decided to add the
Santísima Trinidad
to his tally of prizes. Her masts and colours had gone; she had ceased firing. He sent his first lieutenant, John Smith, with a party of men, to take command. He climbed up into the wreck of
the Spanish flagship. The quarterdeck was mere devastation. None of the leading figures of the Spanish fleet was there to greet Smith. Admiral de Cisneros had been wounded. His commodore, Don Francisco de Uriarte and the captain of the ship, Don Ignacio de Olaeta, were with him also down below, wounded by the British gunfire. There was a Spanish officer on the quarter-deck and he greeted Smith with great courtesy. Smith asked for the surrender of the
Santísima Trinidad.
The officer told him, politely, that he was mistaken. The
Santísima Trinidad
had not surrendered. She had merely paused to provide the guns with more powder, and although she had lost all three of her masts, and she was roiling like a dead whale in the swell, she would soon resume the battle. Lieutenant Smith apologised for his ridiculous and insulting mistake, gathered his men about him, and was escorted back to the ladder, down the side of the flagship to his waiting boat and back to the
Africa.
This was honourable but mere bravado: the
Santísima Trinidad
did not fight again and the British ships left her to be taken in tow later, with her cargo of dead and her freight of wounded pride.

At about 3.30, Hardy came down below again to Nelson and again their conversation makes its turns between the inner and the outer man. The flag captain suggests that Collingwood should take over command of the fleet. Nelson, with sudden energy, attempts to lift himself off his deathbed to deny that position to anyone but himself or at least to Hardy as his deputy. There is no calm going into death here, no Keatsian acceptance of its rest. The level of tension rises in him till the last. But then Nelson falls back into the arms of Scott and Burke. ‘In a few minutes I shall be no more,' he says. And then, even more quietly, a sudden need for intimacy, perhaps for love. ‘Don't throw
me overboard, Hardy.' Hardy says he won't, of course he won't. They have already discussed where he is to be buried: not in the cold enveloping muds beneath Westminster Abbey, where the old memories of the marshes hold a terror for Nelson of dissolution and softness. No, he is to be buried in St Paul's, high and dry on the hill around which the City of London was first made. ‘Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton,' Nelson then says, ‘take care of poor Lady Hamilton. Kiss me, Hardy.' It is Nelson's cheek that Hardy kneels down to kiss, their faces close, the love acknowledged and the barriers down. ‘Now I am satisfied,' Nelson said. There, in that calm sentence, is a kind of private millennium, an arrival, a sense that the race is done. Then again he said ‘Thank God, I have done my duty.' Hardy stood for a few minutes looking down at the man he loved and admired. Nelson's eyes were now closed, his mind no more than half aware. Hardy knelt again and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Who is that?' Nelson said quickly, coming up to consciousness from the depths of his reverie. ‘It is Hardy,' the captain said. Nelson slumped back and replied, ‘God bless you Hardy.' With that the flag captain left the cockpit for the quarterdeck. He had been with him about eight minutes and he knew he would never see him alive again.

This minute-by-minute account of Nelson's death is due almost entirely to the
Authentic Narrative
published in 1807 by William Beatty, the surgeon. It is, in one sense, Nelson's great memorial, the depiction of the man by which he is most known. All Nelson is there: affectionate, anxious, commanding, impatient, trusting, pious, romantic, heroic, mortal. This is the figure which the 19th century inherited. Beatty's Nelson has an air of completeness and resolution. His duty is done and in the light of that his failings are irrelevant. He worries but his worries are set to rest. Battle has become for him, as it would be for the century that followed, a kind of absolution. Deep in the company of the
men who loved him, he is somehow blessed by battle and by his death within it. It is not quite a sanctification, because his sinfulness is not absent. He turns to his own guilt again and again; he thinks again and again of Emma and Horatia, both evidence, in the increasingly austere moral atmosphere of early-19th-century England, of a sin against marriage and its vows. Nelson had treated his wife abominably. In letters to Emma, he had referred to Frances Nelson simply as ‘the impediment'; he had cruelly spurned her own attempts to restore their marriage. He had explicitly longed for both her and Sir William Hamilton to die so that he and Emma might be happy together. But the sinfulness is set within the broader frame of the duty having been done, that duty consisting in the animal courage, the imposition of order, faith in his own daring, the love of his fellow officers and men, the acting out here in this bloody cockpit of the humanity of the victor. In short, as Nelson reviews his life, he recognises that, despite its sinfulness, it has been a life of honour.

This is almost a recreation of West's
Death of Wolfe
, but there are differences. Nelson, like Wolfe, expires at the moment of victory, but Nelson's death has moved away from Wolfe's very public setting; this moment has gone downwards and inwards towards privacy. It is an individual, not a public moment. It is a private tragedy not a public loss. West painted a version of the death of Nelson which imitated his
Death of Wolfe
, but the Nelson painting is a failure. It is historically false, as the Wolfe picture is historically false, but the Nelson picture is false in another sense: it rings untrue in the way that its great predecessor did not. West showed Nelson expiring on deck, with half his crew around him. It looks factually ridiculous—one blast from the
Redoutable
would have blown them away—but more than that it looks psychically ridiculous. The setting of the scene, the mise-en-scène, contradicts the meaning
of what it hopes to portray. Other, slightly ludicrous paintings were made soon after Trafalgar of Nelson's spirit being wafted up to heaven in the arms of Britannia, the apotheosis of his spirit, but they too are little more than historical curios. Drawing on a visual rhetoric which had meant more in the age of Rubens than of Lawrence or Goya, they were public formalities which missed the point. Only one painting of the death of Nelson registered with the spirit of the time and became, in endlessly recycled engravings and prints, the image of the moment which the 19th century preserved. It was not immensely popular at the time and engravings of it were outsold by prints of West's painting. Nor is it, in itself, a particularly painterly work. There is a slight gaucheness, a lack of authority to the figures and its author, Arthur William Devis, is remembered for nearly nothing else. His father, Arthur Devis, had painted delicate and charming conversation pieces of mid-18th-century squires and their families, scenes from which all rhetorical grandeur had been stripped away. The father's people look more like dolls than humans and the son's paintings, translated forward 50 years, share some of that unreality.

Nevertheless, there is an essence there. Devis's
Death of Nelson
shows the scene in the cockpit. The space between the decks is painted too tall, and there is far too much light, most of it apparently emanating from the body of Nelson himself, but otherwise the scene is accurate, both physically and emotionally. The cockpit of the
Victory
is like a recreation of the tomb in which Christ's body is laid. There is no publicity, no reference to larger aspects of the battle, let alone to imperial ambitions. The officers are in their uniforms but no Union flag disrupts the humanity of the scene. Benjamin West had sneered at it. It was, the President of the Royal Academy said, ‘A mere matter of fact [that] will never…excite awe and veneration.' But that is why, for all its unearthly light, and its references to the death of Christ,
the English people took it to heart as the image of a hero. A man is wounded; a man is loved; and a man dies. The absence of anything more is a reflection of his greatness. Devis's imagery, curiously, is reminiscent of Christ's birth in the stable.

About a quarter of an hour after Hardy left him, Nelson became speechless. His pulse could scarcely be felt and his limbs and forehead were cold. The blood was draining from his veins. Nelson's steward, Henry Chevalier, called the surgeon who came to him from the other wounded. Nelson suddenly opened his eyes, gazed up at the deck above him and then closed them again. No words passed but the Reverend Scott continued to rub his chest. Beatty left again and within five minutes the spirit left Nelson's body. The steward fetched Beatty again and the surgeon confirmed it. Nelson had died at about 4.30 in the afternoon, two and three quarter hours after he had been wounded.

The battle was won and Nelson knew of his victory. Twenty-five of the French and Spanish ships had been engaged by the British attack. Sixteen of them had by now surrendered. Victory was assured and Nelson had been martyred in its service.

October 21st to October 28th 1805

Nobility: Dignity; grandeur; greatness
S
AMUEL
J
OHNSON
,
A Dictionary of the English Language
, 1755

As Nelson lay dying, one English officer was failing him. In the aftermath of Trafalgar, it was easy enough to imagine that everyone had played their part as the dictates of honour required. Certainly, Collingwood was reluctant to criticise any of the officers afterwards and only the faintest echoes survive of anything approaching cowardice in the British fleet. There is some evidence, though, that one of the English commanders, third in command after Nelson and Collingwood, Rear-Admiral the Earl of Northesk (he had unexpectedly inherited the title after the death of his elder brother), was reluctant to engage. As his flag-ship, the
Britannia
, approached the battle, Northesk stood on the quarterdeck, arguing with his captain, Charles Bullen. It was said that, with the fight already raging in front of them, Northesk ordered Bullen to reduce sail. After the battle, there was certainly some bitterness in the British fleet at Northesk's reluctance to dive into the brutal and murderous mêlée which their colleagues were subject to. Edward Rotheram, Collingwood's flag captain on the
Royal Sovereign
noted in
his commonplace book afterwards that Northesk
,
‘behaved notoriously ill in the Trafalgar action.'

The earl never commented on the events of the day. But he had no need of victory or glory to advance his standing in British society. He was already possessed of all it might offer him. And Northesk's holding back at Trafalgar did his name no harm. He became a Knight of the Bath, received the thanks of parliament, wore his gold medal, was given the freedom of the City of London, and its sword of honour, treasured his 300-guinea vase from Lloyd's of London—Trafalgar made the life of British marine insurance brokers a great deal easier—and continued to advance smoothly up the lists of the admirals, as if he too had been ferociously and nobly engaged. Of all the commanders in the battle, only Northesk, when he died in 1835, joined Nelson and Collingwood in the crypt of St Paul's, honoured as one of the three great Trafalgar men, simply because he had been an admiral and he was an earl. However apocalyptic an event Trafalgar might have been, certain social realities endured. Unlike nearly everyone else at Trafalgar, Northesk had more to lose—his life and limbs—than to gain. Secure in his position, he was not subject to the mechanics of honour. Dishonourable behaviour was for him a rational choice in a way it never would have been for the captains around and ahead of him, needing to stake all for glory and riches.

At the same moment as Northesk was shortening sail, an equivalent scene was unfolding in the van of the French fleet. Early that morning, Villeneuve's battle plan had fallen apart when Admiral Gravina's Squadron of Observation had become muddled up with the rear of the Combined Fleet. Villeneuve had been left without a tactical reserve and the Franco-Spanish ships had as a result been exposed, one by one, to the overwhelming superiority of British gunnery and aggression. But Villeneuve had another option. The van of the Combined Fleet might itself have played the
part of a tactical reserve. Nelson's attack, just astern of the
Bucentaure
, had left the Combined van, under the command of Admiral Pierre le Pelley Dumanoir, untouched. As the battle developed, Dumanoir continued sailing blithely north. For nearly two hours, with the eight valuable ships of the van around him, in perfect, pre-battle condition, he did not turn. He was abandoning his admiral, his fellow captains and their cause. The logs of the British ships—heavily engaged and buried in gunsmoke—do not comment on Dumanoir's departure. He is simply an absence.

No one has ever resolved whether the reason for Dumanoir's failure to come to the aid of the rest of the fleet was carelessness, cowardice or defeatism. Earlier in the year, he had been in command of the fleet when in Toulon and Villeneuve had been appointed over his head. Like Churruca, he too may have felt that Villeneuve was unsatisfactory as a commander and that to preserve the ships of the vanguard was in itself a practical if inglorious course.

In Dumanoir's column, sailing away from the realm of honour, was a captain for whom such behaviour was unthinkable. On the
Intrépide
, Captain Louis Antoine Cyprian Infernet's eyes remained fixed on the masts of Dumanoir's flagship, the
Formidable
, desperately searching for the signal which he wanted Dumanoir to make: to go about and take part in the Battle of Trafalgar. Infernet was a big man, thought to be as vastly tall as a drum-major (he was 5′ 10″) and ‘as fat as an abbot', rough, uneducated and ferocious, born near Toulon, who bellowed at his crew in the broadest Provençal. He was in other words, a brigand fighter, precisely the sort of man the Revolution had brought to the fore, for whom the idealistic honour of the fight was its own form of nobility.

Villeneuve, in the midst of the chaos and mayhem around the
Bucentaure,
had in fact made the signal for Dumanoir to return but, perhaps because of the gunsmoke,
Dumanoir did not see it and continued northwards. Infernet could tolerate it no longer, and at about 2 o'clock wore ship without Dumanoir's instructions, using one of his ship's boats to bring the
Intrépide
around, as the winds had become so light that the ship would not respond to her helm. Soon afterwards, Dumanoir signalled the whole of the vanguard to reverse direction, and they too needed their ship's boats to haul them round. The manoeuvre took an hour in the light airs. Five of them set off to leeward of the battle. Others including Dumanoir himself in the
Formidable
kept to windward.

Why he should have turned when he did is as much of a conundrum as why he did not turn earlier. Perhaps one can see in it the slow influence of honour, which is not an on-off switch, but a moral force gradually applied. For an hour or so, fear, self-preservation and disdain for Villeneuve may have kept Dumanoir sailing north. But the slow application of honour, as a moral imperative, may by then have had its effect, and forced Dumanoir to turn.

The
Intrépide
was already en route for the enemy. Infernet, when asked for instructions from the master, bellowed to the helmsman: ‘
Lou capo sur lou Bucentauro!
'—Lay the head on the flagship! With the density of gunsmoke, and the light winds doing little to disperse it, Infernet could not have seen the situation Villeneuve was in. But the pure geometry and mathematics of the day could have told him that the centre of the Combined Fleet, with the brutal firepower of British three-deckers now in among them, was in dire need of help.

A young French aristocrat, Auguste Gicquel des Touches, was a sub-lieutenant stationed on the forecastle of the
Intrépide
. He left a graphic account of Infernet's plunge into the midst of battle, driving down through the wreckage and violence in order to rescue Villeneuve. When they finally reached the flagship, both she and the
Redoutable
lay mashed by the guns of the British fleet. Fremantle in the
Neptune
and Bayntun in
Leviathan
had both slapped into both French ships. The masts were down in both of them, their fire almost silenced, just an occasional gun crew maintaining sporadic shots at the enemy around them. It was not a place, with any reason, that a French ship should go but the drive motivating Infernet was not subject to reason. He wished, Gicquel des Touches wrote,

to rescue the Admiral, to take him on board, and to rally around us the vessels which were still in a fit state to fight. The plan was insane, and he himself did not believe in it; it was an excuse that he was giving himself in order to continue the fight, and so that no one could say that the
Intrépide
had left the battle while she still had a single gun and a single sail. It was a noble madness, which cost us dearly, but which we did with joy and alacrity: and which others should have imitated.

That is a note which is not found among the British accounts of Trafalgar. For all the hazards associated with Nelson's perpendicular drive at the iron teeth of the Combined Fleet's broadside; for all the questioning among the officers of the Royal Navy of that tactical idea; there is never a suggestion that this way of conducting battle was ‘noble madness'. It was calculated risk, thriving on the sense that victory could only emerge from damage, and that annihilation of the enemy required an entry into the zone of acute danger. The difference between these mentalities, in other words, was the difference between death and destruction as a means to an end and as an end in itself. Selfsacrifice might have been accepted by Nelson and others in the British fleet as a possible cost; it was not the purpose of battle, as it had by now become for Infernet.

Collingwood had formed something of a line to resist
the ships of the French van now coming south towards him. Infernet drove past that line. The 64-gun
Africa
fired at him, but the
Intrépide'
s guns bellowed back and
Africa
was silenced. Gicquel des Touches found a young midshipman on the forecastle beside him. His face was calm and his bearing upright, maintaining, with his body, the language of honour. Gicquel offered him a glass of wine, which the boy took, but as he brought it up to his lips he could control himself no longer. His hand shook so much that the wine spilled all over the deck. Perhaps as any man would, Gicquel then grasped the boy's hand and told him that he admired him, and that courage lay not in the absence of fear but in mastering it.

British ships clustered around the
Intrépide
: Bayntun in the
Leviathan
, with rigging and rudder shot away after a bruisingly murderous encounter with the
San Agustín
, but still firing; Sir Edward Berry in the
Agamemnon
; Codrington in the
Orion
; even Northesk's
Britannia
which had by now lumbered into battle. Is it possible to conceive the degree of terror which such a sight would instil in any man, particularly those exposed on the deck of the
Intrépide
, as this ring of death closed around them? These moments on
Intrépide
represent one of the most desperate situations in the battle, entirely brought about by Infernet's drive for self-sacrificial honour.

Gicquel des Touches, frantically applying his men on the forecastle to repairing and reknotting the standing rigging by which the foremast was held up, was also keen—‘my ardent desire'—to use them to board a British ship. Codrington in the
Orion
, fighting the coolest-headed battle of all, saw that his friend Henry Bayntun was in trouble, with the beautiful
Leviathan'
s rig largely shot away, and manoeuvred to take on the
Intrépide
in his place. Bayntun hailed Codrington as he passed ‘and said he hoped, laughing, that I should make a better fist of it.'

If there is something of the cricket match in that careless, gentlemanly, amused remark, a moment in which the ideal of the British naval officer seems to be fulfilled, as though a scene in a penny print entitled ‘The Gentleman Gives Way' or perhaps ‘After You Sir', nothing could be further from the atmosphere of extreme anguish on the
Intrépide
. Gicquel des Touches saw

the English vessel
Orion
pass in front of us in order to fire a series of broadsides at us. I arranged my men ready to board, and pointing out to a midshipman the manoeuvres of the
Orion
, I sent him to the captain to beg him to steer so as to board.

Savagery was being poured in the
Intrépide
. Two thirds of her men were now killed or wounded. The sea was hosing in below where shot had punctured the hull. The shrieking of the wounded was drowned by the bellowing of guns. The concentration of British firepower in the centre of the battle was focused on her.

In the forecastle, Gicquel des Touches waited for the change of course which would drive her bow into the
Orion
amidships. But no change of course occurred. Codrington's men fired broadside after broadside into the bow of the
Intrépide
as they passed. Alongside, half a pistol shot away, the
Britannia
slammed at her with her upper batteries. This was annihilation in action, precisely the devastation which Nelson had required. The
Orion
slipped beyond reach and Gicquel des Touches went back towards the quarterdeck to find out why his recommendation had not been followed.

On his way there—and this may be the most poignant failure of courage in Trafalgar, a scene for a matching penny print, this one entitled the ‘The Midshipman's Dread'—Gicquel des Touches found the boy he had sent back a few minutes earlier, lying down behind the bulwarks of the
Intrépide
, flat on his stomach, terrified by the sight of the
Britannia
alongside, unable to move, let alone stand up and walk as far as the quarterdeck to deliver his message. In all the accounts of Trafalgar as they have been preserved, this is the rarest of experiences: paralysing terror. Gicquel des Touches kicked him in the backside and then went on to find Infernet. The captain was breathing fire, slicing off the carved wooden balls on the rail with his sabre and threatening anyone who talked of surrender—undoubtedly the right course of action—with death.

Dumanoir's squadron, coming south, had divided in two, half of it passing to windward of the battle, half to leeward, neither having much effect on the outcome. One ship after another fired at them as they came past: the
Mars
, the
Royal Sovereign
, the
Téméraire
, the
Bellerophon
and the
Victory
. It was these guns firing at Dumanoir's passing ships which Nelson in his last moments heard deep within the bowels of the flagship, shaken by their roaring, to which he muttered, as Beatty so carefully recorded, ‘Oh
Victory
,
Victory
, how you distract my poor brain.' Dumanoir kept well to windward. ‘It is too late to push in now,' he told his flag captain. ‘To join in the battle now would be only an act of despair. It would only add to our losses.' The
Victory
's log says they ‘fired our larboard guns at those they would reach.' But even such long-distance fire was made to tell. The
Formidable
had 65 men killed and wounded on board and the hull was damaged enough for the water to be rising in her hold at the rate of four feet an hour. Her mainyard was broken, her sails shot through, her bowsprit and the mizzenmast shattered. This was damage enough for Dumanoir to claim he had played his part at Trafalgar. It didn't impress Napoleon who after the news of the battle reached France expressed the desire to see Dumanoir either shot or ruined. He eventually escaped either fate and became a distinguished sailor after the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne.