The names reverberate like a sustained drumroll — Victory, Royal Sovereign, Téméraire, Colossus, Mars, Bellerophon — an overture heralding the violence that will erupt when the warships drifting slowly downwind finally break into the crescent line of the French and Spanish fleet. At midday on the 21 October, the first massive broadsides are fired, smoke obscures the scene, and, when it clears three hours later, 19 enemy ships have struck their colours, another six will shortly be taken or wrecked, and Admiral Lord Nelson lies dead.
In the two centuries since, it is less the strategic significance of Trafalgar that guarantees its fame than the operatic tragedy of the hero dying in the moment of victory. For the participants too, the emotional loss outweighed the triumph. In his official despatch, Admiral Collingwood confessed, ‘My heart is rent with the most poignant grief for the death of a friend — a grief to which even the glorious occasion in which he fell does not bring the consolation which perhaps it ought.’ And below deck a seaman in the Royal Sovereign wrote in amazement, ‘All the men in our ship are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed. God bless you! Chaps that fought like the devil sit down and cry like a wench.’ On that stricken note, with the nation saved and Nelson awaiting burial in Westminster Abbey, the curtain comes down.
But naval warfare has no neat endings, and every hero is replaceable. The great victory that destroyed Napoleon’s invasion plans left more than half the British fleet reduced to dismasted hulks, while French squadrons in ports from the Channel to the Adriatic remained unharmed and ready to put to sea.
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