Losing Nelson (2 page)

Words that are remembered, recorded, famous words. But this brightening weather has revealed an awesome discrepancy in the strength of the opposing fleets. Jervis has fifteen sail of the line. Six of them are three-deckers, but only the
Victory
and the
Britannia
have as many as a hundred guns. All the rest, including Horatio’s, are two-deck ships with seventy-four guns, the standard warship of the Royal Navy at that time. In addition Jervis has four frigates, faster than the line ships, essential for scouting and intelligence. I set them out now, on a diagonal, to windward of the English line. This is the force with which Jervis is proposing to engage the Spanish Grand Fleet, twenty-seven ships of the line, ten frigates, and a brig. Six of the Spanish three-deckers are carrying 112 guns, and there is the mighty
Santissima Trinidad
with 136. Altogether they have twice the fire power of the English. But there are compensating factors. The Spanish have put to sea in haste, they are undermanned, their officers are inexperienced.

Everything is in place. It is fourteen minutes to one. One hour and four minutes previously, while I was panicking at Knightsbridge, Jervis had given a bold and unconventional signal. On this occasion he cannot follow the rigid procedures laid down by the Admiralty in London for the conduct of sea battles, procedures that have not changed in a hundred years: You lay alongside, preserve strict in-line formation, and pound away in a duel of broadsides until the enemy is crippled or surrenders or runs. Jervis cannot do this because his force is too inferior; he would be overwhelmed. So he has given the order to put on press of sail and break through the gap in the enemy formation. It is the only tactic possible. Once through, the English fleet can attack to windward, concentrating its fire on the eighteen ships of the rear, disabling them before the van can make the turn into the wind and come to their aid.

A perfect day for sea fighting—calm, with a light breeze, no rolling to disturb the calculation of the gunners. I check that the English ships are in correct order of sail as they pass through the enemy, Troubridge leading the van in the
Culloden
, Collingwood bringing up the rear in the
Excellent
. Third from the rear is Horatio in the
Captain
, flying the Broad Pennant; he is a commodore now—since the previous March.

So they pass through. The Spanish spine is severed. But now Jervis blunders. He cannot altogether break from his conditioning, free himself from the rigid code of line-ahead formation. He hoists his signal: once through to the west of the Spanish, the fleet is to tack in succession and bear down on them.
In succession
. No sir, wrong. It should have been simultaneously. For fifteen ships to make the turn, one after the other, each waiting till the one ahead has completed the manouevre, and then to reform in line—this will take too long, the advantage will be lost.

But of course they obey, they are bred to obedience. Here they are now, in a wide inverted V on the ocean as they begin to execute the manouevre, in perfect formation still, the
Culloden
still leading. But the Spanish have the wind. De Córdoba has understood, he alters course northwards, he means to bear over the wind and unite his fleet. Then he can fight or run as he chooses, and he will have time to do it; only the first six English ships have so far completed the turn and they have not yet come up with the Spanish, they are still out of range.

One man sees this, and that man is Horatio Nelson. It is now 12:50
P.M
. Without a second’s hesitation, disregarding his commander’s signal, he veers the
Captain
away from the wind,
he breaks the line
. The audacity of it, the impetuous logic! To recognize absolute necessity and act on that instant of recognition. Now again, in this silent room, as I send the
Captain
into the attack and her colours glint on the dark surface, I feel a constriction in the throat and my heart beats faster at the dash and defiance of it. The move has brought us, at a stroke, across the bows of at least seven Spanish ships, among them the huge
Santissima Trinidad
, the
San Josef
, the
Salvador del Mundo
, and the
San Nicolas
, these four alone possessing 440 guns against Horatio’s 74.

At the moment that he swung away from the wind and broke the line, risking the outcome of the battle and his whole career on this one throw, at that moment, in his thirty-ninth year, Horatio became an angel. He entered a different sphere. I will say what I think angels are. They can be dark or bright, but they all have the gift of spontaneity, of creating themselves anew. This is a pure form of energy, and Horatio was winged with it. All the same, angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognize
each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time or distance. He became a bright angel on February 14, 1797, during the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. I became his dark twin on September 9, 1997, when I too broke the line.

I had no presentiment of this on that February afternoon, as I moved my model ships about on their glass ocean. Since my father’s death I had been experiencing bouts of gloom—not sorrow—and at times a sort of excited restlessness that made it difficult for me to keep still. And I had run into a difficult patch in the book I was writing,
The Making of a Hero
. I had got bogged down in the events of June 1799 in Naples and Horatio’s part in them. This book had been going on for more than five years, ever since December 1991. I started it on Boxing Day, the anniversary of his mother’s death. The Naples business was worrying me; I could not leap over it. Progress was slow; lately, in fact, there hadn’t been any. I kept retreating, rewriting pieces of his earlier life. It was for this reason that I began to feel slightly uneasy now, as I went on with the battle. Because at this point I had to bring Troubridge into the action, and at the time I did not much care to dwell on Troubridge, Horatio’s brother officer and friend, closely associated with him in this battle but also in the treatment, two years later, of the Jacobin rebels in Naples—the business that was holding me up with my book.

Certainly there is no doubt of his fighting spirit. Horatio is not left long to fight alone. He is joined by Troubridge in the
Culloden
, the leading English ship, which has now completed the turn ordered by Jervis and come within range. For nearly an hour these two exchange broadsides with the Dons, superior discipline and gunnery making up for inferiority of armament. Now here is the gallant
Blenheim
coming up to give them a respite, passing between them and the enemy, pouring fire as she goes. The
Culloden
is crippled, she falls astern. Collingwood ranges up in the
Excellent
, last ship of the line. He passes
within ten feet of the
San Nicolas
, eighty guns, and blasts her in masterly fashion with two broadsides in succession.

Ten feet
. The length of this table. That would be about it. Almost jumping distance. These towering ships, fighting so close, hardly more than the length of a man between them, launching their thunderous fire, shuddering from stem to stern with the repeated recoil of the guns—the English gun crews could deliver a broadside every seventy-five seconds. Dismemberment and maiming inflicted almost within range of an embrace. Hard even for a landsman of the time, the notion of such closeness, such promiscuous intimacy of destruction. How much more so for us now, with our concept of war as distant erasure, a button touched, a figure or a thousand figures obliterated on a screen.

The close-quarter fighting gives Horatio his second great triumph of the day. The
San Nicolas
, reeling from Collingwood’s fire, falls foul of her compatriot, the huge
San Josef
, three decks, 112 guns. The two Spanish ships, both badly damaged, are inextricably locked together. I set them together here, side by side, to the windward of Horatio. His own ship by now is completely disabled. She has lost her fore topmast; her wheel has been shot away; neither sail nor rigging is left. She is incapable of fighting in line, incapable of giving chase.

Again Horatio demonstrates the promptness of genius. The genius of a hero lies in his extreme readiness to action—which is not the same as rashness. He lays his ship aboard the starboard quarter of the
San Nicolas
. His sprit sail passes over the Spaniard’s poop and locks in her mizzen shrouds. Three ships tangled together now; here they are, side by side. Horatio calls for a boarding party. Short of stature—he is only five feet six inches—slight of frame, with one eye more or less useless to him after the wound he suffered in the Corsican campaign two and a half years before, newly fledged angel with bright sword in hand, he leads the way, passing from the fore chains of his own ship
into the quarter gallery of the
San Nicolas
. In the exchange of fire that follows, the Spanish commander is mortally wounded. The Spaniards surrender, but while Horatio is receiving the officers’ swords, his party is fired upon. Seven English seamen are killed in this fusillade. Where is it coming from? From above and beyond, from the stern gallery of the
San Josef
, still helplessly tangled aloft. Without a flicker of hesitation, Horatio orders his mariners to return the enemy fire, stations sentinels at the hatchway to keep the enemy belowdecks, and charges on. He will board an enemy ship from the deck of another already boarded and taken!

His friend Berry is at hand, helping him into the main chains, keeping beside him during the headlong scramble from ship to ship. But on board the
San Josef
there is no resistance. A Spanish officer hails from the quarterdeck to say that she surrenders. The flag captain, on bended knee, presents his sword. The admiral is dying of wounds below. With his own ship disabled, Horatio has captured two enemy ships, both more heavily armed, using one as a stepping stone to the other. An action without parallel in the annals of naval history.

Luck, some might say—the right man in the right place at the right time. But angels make their own luck. Otherwise, how can it be explained that it was always he who broke the mold? Collingwood was equally well placed to veer out of line and throw himself across the bows of the Spanish. Not a question of courage or skill; Collingwood had plenty of both. But he stayed in line.

Late afternoon; the light is failing. Jervis has only twelve ships now that are capable of fighting. The Spanish have been defeated, four of their ships have been taken. It is time to disengage. Gradually the fire ceases, the fleets separate, the English stand for Lagos, the Spanish for Cadiz. After this terrible local storm, these hours of thunder and slaughter, peace settles down, the ocean comes to herself again and swallows the corpses and the drifting spars.

I sat on there, after the battle. I have never been at sea, except twice on the cross-Channel ferry. That was a long time ago, before my illness. No, I am his land shadow. I have been abroad only once since then, just once in twenty years. That was when I went with my father to Tenerife to see the place where Horatio lost his right arm.

I
sat for quite a while without moving, sensing the winter dusk that was falling beyond my shuttered room, muffling the streets outside as it had the blank sea after that ferocious encounter. The short duration of these battles has always stirred my imagination. Fifty or sixty miles those ships could make in a day, not more. They had only recently invented instruments that could tell them where they were. For weeks or months they tracked each other across vast spaces of ocean. Then one day the sail on the horizon, the gradual closing of the distance, the routine activity of preparation. Finally the moment that gave this murderous patience its meaning: the twitch on the lanyard, the crash of the guns.

My models sat there, unmarked, immaculate. No decks slippery with blood. The glass showed nothing but the reflection of the hulls. No pools of tar, no wreckage, no swirl of sharks. Silence in the room had been unbroken. No storm of grapeshot, no shrieking tangles of
chains and nails and razor-edged splinters of metal and wood, no groans and screams of wounded and dying men, no cheers as the gun crews saw their shots strike home. Cheers and screams, the two conflicting sounds of eighteenth-century sea battle.

I was visited by a sense of desolation, something like bereavement. Could one who had never known it in his own person grieve for the din of battle and the confusion and the blood? The question, coming to my mind in such a form, made me feel restless and somehow awed, a sensation difficult to describe, like a brush of wings, quite unaccustomed at the time, though it became more frequent afterwards. Usually when we fought these battles I had a feeling of fulfilment, they brought me closer to him, I shared in his triumphs. I know now that this first taste of mourning was a sign to me. At the time I thought it was no more than a delayed reaction to my panic of earlier, my fear of failing him.