Victory at Sea

Seize the Fire

Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar

by Adam Nicolson

HarperCollins, 341 pp., $26.95

Nelson’s Trafalgar

The Battle that Changed the World

by Roy Adkins

Viking, 416 pp., $27.95

THE BATTLE OFF CAPE TRAFALGAR on October 21, 1805, was the denouement of almost 50 years of naval warfare between the French and British. It was one of the most destructive naval battles in history, and the last fleet engagement of the age of fighting sail.

The popular conception is that the battle saved England from invasion, forming a trio with Drake’s defeat of the Armada in 1588 and the RAF’s stand against the Luftwaffe in 1940. The legend is not strictly true. Trafalgar did not save Britain–which was already extremely safe, as France’s attempts to invade Ireland in 1797 and 1798 had shown; rather, it gave England control of the Mediterranean for a century.

Trafalgar was the logical outcome of 15 years of British naval dominance. It would have been the same if Lord Nelson had been able to catch the French fleet in the West Indies in June, or if Admiral Calder had caught it in clear weather instead of fog off Cape Finisterre in July. No naval officer on either side had any other expectation than that of British victory. In the end it proved a massacre–the kill ratio was 10-1–more akin to Omdurman than Waterloo.

It was a peculiarly British sort of victory, one that belongs not just to the men who fought it, but also to the efficient naval service and its vast bureaucracy; to decades of seamanship, training, planning, and organization; and to thousands of miles of trade routes bringing timber, hemp, tar, flax, and everything else a small island couldn’t produce from far-off markets. The British genius for war is perfectly seen at Trafalgar–the culmination of endless lines of supply and countless acts of tradition and honor: the action of a python, not a tiger. And the great victory only scorched the tiger. The day before Nelson gave his life and his men took 19 ships without loss, Napoleon had defeated the Austrians at Ulm, and a month later he won his greatest victory, defeating the combined Russian and Austrian armies at Austerlitz.

In Horatio Nelson, the British had a leader as successful as Napoleon. It is startling how similar were Nelson’s and Napoleon’s views of war. “I see only one thing, namely the enemy’s main body. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves,” Napoleon declared in 1797. Nelson, in his famous memorandum to his captains on October 9, 1805, wrote, “[I]n case Signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.” Throughout the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, carried the signal “Engage the Enemy More Closely.”

It was an age of aggressive warfare where caution was punished both on and off the battlefield. The fate of Vice Admiral Sir Robert Calder, who had a chance to achieve a decisive victory against the fleet Nelson eventually devastated at Trafalgar, is telling. Calder commanded the British fleet blockading Ferrol and guarding against the union of the Spanish and French fleets in their bid to control the English Channel for the hours necessary to embark a French army to invade England.

On July 22, 1805, in a heavy fog, the fleet that had been relentlessly pursued to the West Indies and back by Nelson’s Mediterranean fleet made contact with Calder’s ships off Cape Finisterre. Downwind and outnumbered 15 to 20, Calder engaged the enemy and captured two Spanish ships of the line before night fell. Over the next two days, Calder had the opportunity to re-engage, but he held back fearing that his enemy would be reinforced by the 15 Spanish ships in Ferrol. Calder chose the discreet course of following his orders and keeping the fleets uncombined. He failed to understand that in the Age of Nelson and Napoleon, commanders were expected to take chances, to close with their enemy and destroy him. Calder was berated in the press and felt under suspicion of cowardice. He requested a court martial that he thought would clear his name. The verdict of the court was damning:

The Court is of the opinion, that the charge of not having done his utmost to renew the said engagement, and to take or destroy every ship of the enemy, has been proved against the said Vice-Admiral Calder; that it appears that his conduct has not been actuated either by cowardice or disaffection, but has arisen solely from error in judgment, and is highly censurable.

Calder had been caught out by Nelson’s new form of warfare, where total victory was the only object. From 9:30 a.m. on October 19, 1805, when Nelson learned that a combined fleet of 33 French and Spanish ships under the command of Admiral Villeneuve had sailed from Cadiz, he devoted his every energy to bringing his adversary to battle. He did not fear for his fleet; he feared that the enemy he had spent years awaiting would escape him and battle.

It had already been a difficult campaign for Nelson. In March, Villeneuve and his fleet escaped from Toulon and sailed across the Atlantic to threaten British possessions in the West Indies. Nelson first went east thinking their object was Egypt. When he learned otherwise, he took up the chase, reaching the Caribbean in early June and frightening his opponent into racing back home. Villeneuve had his chance encounter with Calder in late July, and in early August, took safe harbor in Cadiz. Nelson was back where he started–hoping to tempt his opponent into battle–after more than four months of constant worry and full-speed chase. The complete campaign lasted eight months and involved 11 fleets, with the British admirals anticipating and countering every French or Spanish move with tremendous skill. It was the largest campaign fought under sail at sea, and was a strategic victory as impressive as Trafalgar itself was a tactical one.

Most books about Trafalgar overlook the larger campaign in favor of the day of battle, and books marking the 200th anniversary of the battle are no exception. These two new volumes are notable for being serious attempts at a standard account of the battle. Neither Adam Nicolson nor Roy Adkins is a naval historian, and both have gotten up the subject from the vast troves of published material. Both write well and have produced works that are surpassingly entertaining at points.

Adkins has structured his book around quotations from first-hand accounts, in a form of “oral history.” These actually detract from what is a nicely brisk account of life in Nelson’s navy, and a fine retelling of the battle–particularly as his own prose gets important matters across quickly:

In the end, all the arguments about how much, if at all, Nelson had been identified as a target for French snipers, and whether or not he made himself deliberately conspicuous, are largely irrelevant. It was a quirk of fate, a phenomenon Nelson well understood, that instead of engaging the Bucentaure, the Victory became locked alongside the Redoutable, the one ship in the combined fleet that had well-trained and motivated marksmen, who had been set the task of clearing the upper decks of the Victory prior to boarding.

Yet every time Adkins picks up speed, he rolls out some long block quotation. This is very distracting. A large number of first-person accounts of Trafalgar are readily available, and they are easier to read when printed whole instead of in bleeding chunks. A historian should not be a compiler.

Nicolson’s book is more ambitious. His stirring account of the many hours of battle is stretched on a frame of social history dealing with the idea of heroism and the “long tradition of English violence”–the phrase is from the first line of his book. Nicolson is fascinated by his own learning and desire to make connections between Nelson’s tactics and William Wordsworth’s poetry, between the working of the British battle lines and Adam Smith’s monetary principles, between William Blake’s poetry and Nelson’s character.

Nicolson writes, “If Nelson was, as Byron described him, ‘Britannia’s God of War,’ it was due to his intuitive understanding of the intimacy of violence, love, courage, honor, classlessness, and victory. That was the amalgam which undoubtedly drew the mass of the ships’ companies at Trafalgar into their deep love and admiration of him.”

While some of this may be true for the captains close to Nelson, the sailors–the mass of the ships’ companies–were loyal to Nelson because he was victorious. He brought them prize money and gave them glory to brag about. Nicolson makes the same mistake when he characterizes the cheering of the crews when they realized that the French were caught as “they were seeing battle as home, as the moment of perfection.” They were cheering the end of a long wait–some of these ships had been on blockade duty for years–and the chance at prize money and a rapid return home. It was the capital-R Romantic era, but that doesn’t mean we have to see everything through the prism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Nicolson characterizes his work as “an attempt to describe the mental landscape of the people who fought and commanded at one of the great battles in history and, it asks, in particular, why and how the idea of the hero flowered here.” It is a compelling idea, and Nicolson is never less than interesting in the parallels he draws, even when he gets carried away. But his ambition is at odds with the book his publisher wanted written for the Trafalgar bicentennial. The social/cultural history is defeated by the battle narrative, which, in turn, is robbed of the fullness it deserves. The grafting of the two distinct histories together is a failure, but made pleasurable by Nicolson’s capacity for evocative writing on both fronts. An example of each:

Far more than any war of the 18th century, this was a triangular, ideological conflict. A post-revolutionary, authoritarian regime in France, profoundly subversive of all the accepted nostrums of pre-modern European society, was allied in Spain with the most conservative and backward of all the European powers, the trailing partner in the alliance, against a Britain which already embodied a distinctly modern Atlanticist set of values–commercial, libertarian, amoral and aggressive–but which remained, nevertheless, dressed in some very old-fashioned “King and Country,” monarchist 18th-century establishment clothes. . . .
[Royal Sovereign] was strolling into hell; for perhaps 20 minutes she would be exposed to the fire of the enemy line; for perhaps another 20 minutes beyond that, before the Belleisle herself could come up, Collingwood’s flagship would be alone in the midst of the enemy. But he did not pause, nor in any way reduce sail. The fear was not of battle, nor of the French and Spanish gunners even then gauging the distance, but of the wind dropping, of the engagement going off at half-cock and of the enemy fleet finding its way back into Cadiz before they were made to fight.

Adkins’s is arguably the better book about the battle, and a better introduction to the fleets that fought in it, but Nicolson’s work is the more impressive product. Still, neither does anything to challenge the two best accounts of the battle: John Keegan’s 86-page account in his Price of Admiralty (1988) is a masterpiece of concision and eloquence; and Dudley Pope’s nearly 50-year-old book, Decision at Trafalgar (1959), is one of the best single-volume narratives of battle ever written. Pope’s gift for finding the telling details was amazing, and it’s pleasant to report that Henry Holt has reissued the book.

What none of these books does is tell the story of the full naval campaign in any larger, strategic way. For that, you must turn to Sir Julian Corbett’s The Campaign of Trafalgar (1910). It was one of the very first works of modern naval history, remains one of the greatest, and has just been reissued by Nonesuch Books. That may be the finest mark of the bicentennial of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Robert Messenger is deputy managing editor of the New York Sun.

Related Content