Men of Honour (4 page)

Set against the Spanish pieties, the names of the French
ships proclaimed a different culture: the great inheritance of Greek and Roman heroes, the beauties of France herself, the burning ardour of revolutionary zeal, the glories of empires which France had conquered and, like the masterpieces Napoleon was gathering in the Louvre, could adopt as her own. There was not a Christian idea or reference among them.

In October 1805, though, there was some mismatch between the trumpeting of these glories and the actual condition of the fleet. The flagship, the
Bucentaure
, was named after the great gilded barge of the Doge of Venice, the ancient republic finally humiliated by Napoleon in 1797. But the
Bucentaure
had been struck by lightning and all her masts were in a fragile condition. Nor were there any timbers in Cadiz with which to replace them. She wasn't alone in her fragility. Most of the ships of the French fleet had been sent to sea, as Villeneuve wrote to the Ministry, with ‘bad masts, bad sails and bad rigging', and, overall, his account of the force under his command was full of unintended irony:

The
Formidable
, the
Mont Blanc
, the
Fougueux
, [meaning the
Ardent
], and the
Swiftsure
[a ship captured from the British, and left with its earlier name as a taunt to the enemy] all need docking. The
Scipion
[the name of the two greatest and most aggressive of Roman generals] and the
Aigle
[the symbol of imperial dominance] want rerigging. The
Pluton
[the King of Hell] and the
Héros
can scarcely sail. The
Indomptable
, the
Achille
and the
Berwick
[another British capture] all have weak and incompetent crews.

It was a depressing audit, the rhetoric floating free of the vessels it adorned. ‘There is not a ship,' the admiral wrote, ‘with less than sixty sick on board.'

These were not temporary aberrations. There were deep and systematic failures in French naval administration of which all this was the outward sign. There had been French successes in the past: they had been defeated by the British Royal Navy during the Seven Years War between 1757 and 1763, but after radical reorganisation and major investment had out-fought and out-manoeuvred the British during the American War of Independence. In the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which had begun in 1793, they, like the other Europeans, had been consistently defeated by the Royal Navy, and at an extraordinary cost in human lives. It has been calculated that in the six major battles between British fleets and their French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish enemies (First of June 1794, Cape St Vincent 1797, Camperdown 1797, The Nile 1798, Copenhagen 1801 and Trafalgar 1805) the British lost a total of 5,749 men killed and wounded, of whom 1,483 were killed in battle. In the same engagements, their enemies lost 38,970 killed, wounded and taken prisoner, of whom 9,068 were killed in battle itself, a figure over six times greater than the number of British dead.

At Trafalgar that disproportion rose to an unprecedentedly high ratio of very nearly ten times the number of French and Spanish dead to English, but that Everest of slaughter was only the culmination of a consistent pattern. Over more than twelve years, in a wide variety of conditions and theatres of naval war, the British had savagely outkilled their opponents.

Much of what follows will attempt to explain that imbalance, but there can be no doubt that the travails and evolutions of France herself were at least partly to blame. Before the Revolution, the French navy had been in far from perfect condition, without an effective central board of control—nothing to match the British Admiralty—and consistently struggling to source the large number of
complex materials needed to equip a fleet. French shipbuilders had, throughout the 18th century, designed light, fast and efficient ships, the envy of their British enemies and widely copied by them. But the sourcing of the necessary materials had consistently imposed strains which were not met. The 74-gun ship had by the end of the century become the workhorse of all navies—heavy enough to confront anything, fast enough to pursue any other ship-of-the-line. But to create a 74-gun ship required 100,000 cubic feet of timber for the hull, 168,000 pounds of hemp for the rigging, 33,750 pounds of copper to sheathe that hull, keeping it clean and fast, and 4,800 pounds of nails to fix the entire elaborate assemblage together. About 3,400 trees, from about 75 acres of woodland, were needed for each ship. Ninety per cent of that was oak, half of it straight, for the keel, stempost and the heavy planking; half of it curved, for the knees and breasthooks on which the integral strength of a ship-of-the-line relied.

The supply system was the foundation of any navy and throughout the 1790s the British had applied the screw. Ship timber was being imported into Britain from the Adriatic, masts and hemp from North America, and large quantities of materials were carried from the Baltic. Decks were made of ‘good Prussia deals' and the British Admiralty always specified that ‘all the Iron-work shall be wrought of the best Swedish iron'. By the end of the century, the number of British merchantmen sailing south from the Baltic to British ports had reached the astonishing total of 4,500 every year, the majority of them laden with naval stores: corn, tallow, hides, hemp and iron. Commerce was not only the purpose and prize of the long war against France; it was its method.

The cost of the fleet to the British Treasury was enormous: in 1805 alone, £2.9 million was spent on the pay of the 107,000 seamen and marines in the Royal Navy;
another £2.96 million on their food; but fully £4.68 million was spent on repairing the wear and tear of vessels which were maintaining the blockades around the European shores. By comparison, only £400,000 was spent on ordnance, on the guns and their shot which would do the damage at Trafalgar. It was the very bodies of the ships themselves, and the materials of which the ships were made, which imposed the financial strain, demanding from the British government more than a third of its total annual expenditure.

The French struggled and failed to keep up. Even by the measure of looking after their own men, they failed. In 1801, Admiral Ganteaume in command of the premier fleet in France, the Brest squadron, wrote imploringly to the minister:

I once more call your attention to the terrible state in which the sea men are left, unpaid for fifteen months, naked or covered with rags, badly fed, down in the mouth; in a word sunk under the weight of the deepest and most humiliating wretchedness.

Since the late 17th century, the French state had reserved large slices of their native oak forest for those hulls, but it was not enough and they ransacked Italian oakwoods and Corsican pinewoods for their needs. The catastrophes of the 1790s had exacerbated the problem. When the British Admiral Lord Hood burnt nine French ships of the line and removed three more from Toulon in December 1793 (he had already taken one 74, an earlier
Scipion
, which soon sank) he also burned untold quantities of slowly maturing French oak from those government forests, stacked in the Toulon yards, and even larger quantities of mast—and spar-timber from the Baltic. The total destruction in 1798 of the French Mediterranean fleet at the Battle of the Nile, and in a series of individual ship actions after it,
were both key elements in a form of attritional warfare which left the French naval establishment bruised, bleeding and diminished. The figures make it clear enough. In 1793, Britain had 135 ships-of-the-line and 133 frigates, the French well behind with 80 ships-of-the-line and 66 frigates. By 1801, at the peace of Amiens, the number of British warships had risen to 202 ships-of-the-line and 277 frigates. France at the same moment had 39 ships of the line and 35 frigates. Attrition had exacted its price.

In many ways, Trafalgar had been won at Toulon and the Nile. More, though, than technological and material failure, the long unrolling political crisis in France during the last years of the 18th century meant that the navy did not have the necessary depth and consistency of support it needed. The failing monarchy, the Revolution, the Terror, the string of half-competent administrations in the late 1790s and the coming to power of Napoleon—the ‘land animal' as he was called—all, in their different ways, failed the French navy.

In the 19th century, it was often said by French conservative historians that the triumphant French navy of the American War of Independence was destroyed by the Revolution and the chaos that followed. That is not true. The endemic weaknesses stretched back into the management and structures of the pre-revolutionary navy itself. The French officer corps was traditionally formed into two divisions:
l'épée
and
la plume
, the fighting and the administrative arms. Each regarded the other with contempt: the pen thinking the sword incompetent, the sword regarding the pen as common. The British Board of Admiralty had a hint of the same division between politically appointed civilians and experienced, fighting ‘sea lords', but further down the ranks of the Royal Navy, fighting tasks, sailing tasks and administrative tasks were all performed, at different stages, by the same individuals.
The three core demands of a navy—to supply and fit itself; to survive the sea; and to kill the enemy—were understood in Britain to be part of a single integrated whole. In both Spain and France, that single organism was institutionally divided into conflicting and competing parts.

This was largely a reflection of social structure. In England, the officers of the navy came from a broad spread of English society, stretching from the lower reaches of the aristocracy through the landed gentry and professional classes to (occasionally) the genuinely poor. Of Nelson's great predecessors in the 18th century, for example, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who ran his fleet up on rocks off Scilly, was the son of a Norwich merchant; Byng, who was shot for cowardice off Minorca, was the son of a Kentish gentleman; Vernon was the son of a London merchant; Anson from Staffordshire gentry; Hawke the son of a barrister; Rodney from a family of army officers, and with his mother's father a judge; Howe was the second son of an Irish peer; Lord Hood was the son of a vicar, like Nelson himself; Lord Barham's father was a customs officer; St Vincent's a lawyer; and Lord Cornwallis was the fourth son of a peer, who like his brothers had been educated at Eton.

Those are the great men of the 18th-century navy. There is a drift towards high social status among them, but it is a far from exclusive set. Their mixed social origins are evidence of a kind of responsive elasticity in the hiring and promoting strategies of the Royal Navy. Nothing could have been more different in the Marine Royale of Bourbon France. There, any access to the officer corps was, as in Spain, rigidly restricted to members of the aristocracy. Access to the Grand Corps was through the élite trainee cadres of the
Gardes de la Marine
and the
Gardes du Pavillon
.

In the British navy, the test to become a junior officer, a lieutenant, depended on having spent at least six years at
sea as a midshipman and an ability to answer a series of disturbingly sea-based questions. As the standard form of words approving a promotion to lieutenant expressed it, the candidate had to prove that he could

Splice, Knot, Reef a sail, work a Ship Sailing, Shift his Tides, keep a Reckoning of a Ships way by Plain Sailing and Mercator, Observe by the Sun or Star, find the variation of the Compass and is qualified to do his Duty as an Able Seaman and a Midshipman.

In May 1805, one young man, William Badcock, was sent forward by his captain Thomas Fremantle of the
Neptune
to sit his exam. He was in a state of extreme nerves and the three captains on the examining board allowed him to sit quietly for a few moments so that he would do himself justice. Then they began.

I was desired to stand up, and consider myself on the quarterdeck of a man-of-war at Spithead—‘unmoor'—‘get underway'—‘stand out to sea'—‘make and shorten sail'—‘reef'—‘return into port'—‘unrig the foremast and bowsprit, and rig them again'. I got into a scrape after reefing for not overhauling the reef tackles when reefing the sails [because unless those tackles were overhauled, the sails would not set fair]. However they passed me, and desired me to come again the next day to receive my passing certificate. I made the captains the best bow I could and, without staying, to look behind me, bolted out of the room…

For the young French aristocrat officers of the
gardes
, there was no equivalent. They were given an education in the great ports of Brest, Rochefort and Toulon and the curriculum they followed was essentially mathematical. They
studied hydrography and the customs of the shipbuilding trade in both England and Spain, but no history, nothing about fighting or sailing tactics. There were daily sessions set aside for both dancing and fencing. Any suggestion that a French officer would know how to steer a ship, reef a sail, splice a warp or make a Single Diamond Knot, a Sprit-Sail Sheet Knot, a Carrick Bend, a Midshipman's Hitch, a throat seizing, a mouse for a stay or puddings for yards, would have drawn as quizzical a look from him as it does from us. All those tasks, and tens more, described in detail and with diagrams in the midshipman's
vade mecum
, ‘
The Young Sea Officer's Sheet Anchor
', first published in Leeds in 1808, but drawing on centuries-long expectation, were required to be known by an officer in the British Royal Navy. There was a naval academy in England established at Dartmouth, but it was not the usual or favoured route to a successful naval career. The British training ground was at sea.

In this was the core difference between the middleclass British and upper-class French and Spanish officer corps. For an aristocrat, failure in battle does not erode his standing or his honour. He remains, as long as he has behaved with courage, the man he was born to be. For the younger son of the English gentry, or of a lawyer or merchant, as most British naval officers were, there is no such destined luxury. If he fails at sea, his standing is diminished; he has not won the prize money which will set him up at home; his name is not gilded with honour; he has failed in the same way that a failing entrepreneur has failed. To preserve his honour and his name, he needs to win. Victory is neither a luxury nor an ornament. It is a compulsion and a necessity.