1805 (30 page)

‘
Capitaine
Drinkwater, I am ordered by His Excellency Vice-Admiral Villeneuve to remind you of your parole and the courtesy done you by permitting you to keep your sword. It is also necessary that I ask you that you will do nothing during the action to prejudice this ship. Without these assurances I 'ave orders to confine you in irons.' It was a rehearsed speech and he could see the hand of Magendie as well as the courtliness of Villeneuve.

‘Lieutenant Guillet, it would dishonour both myself and my country
if I was not to conform to your request. I assure you that both myself and my midshipman will do nothing to interfere with the
Bucentaure
. Will you convey my compliments to His Excellency and I thank you for your kind attentions to us and wish you good fortune in the hours ahead.'

They exchanged bows and Guillet departed. The forenoon dragged on. Drinkwater wrote in his journal and comforted the starving Gillespy. A strange silence hung over the groaning fabric of the warship, permeating down through her decks and hatchways. Even the men awaiting the arrival of the wounded in the orlop talked among themselves in whispers. About mid-morning they heard a muffled shout, drowned immediately in a terrific rumbling sound that startled them after the long and heavy silence.

‘Running out the guns,' Drinkwater explained to Gillespy.

‘
Captaine
, will you come to the deck at once . . .' It was Guillet, his appearance hurried and breathless.

Drinkwater rose and put on his hat. He turned to Gillespy. ‘Remain here, Mr Gillespy. You are in no circumstances to leave the orlop.'

‘Aye, aye, sir.'

Drinkwater followed Guillet up through the lower gun-deck. It was flooded by shafts of sunshine coming in through the open gun-ports. Every cannon was run out and the crews squatted expectantly round them, one or two peering through at the approaching British. Lieutenants and
aspirants
paced along their divisions and a murmur ran up and down the guns. Guillet and Drinkwater emerged on deck and Guillet led him directly to where Villeneuve, Magendie and Prigny were staring westwards. His heart beating furiously, Drinkwater followed the direction of their telescopes.

Under a sky of blue and over an almost calm sea furrowed by a ponderous swell from the westward, the British fleet came down on the Combined Fleet in two loose groups, prevented from getting into any regular formation by the lightness of the westerly breeze. Drinkwater looked briefly round him to see the Franco–Spanish ships in almost as much disorder. The decision to wear, though two hours old, had thrown them into a confusion from which it would take them some time to recover. Instead of a single line with the frigates to leeward and Gravina's crucial detachment slightly to weather, the whole armada was a loose crescent, bowed away from the advancing British towards the distant blue outline of Cape Trafalgar on the horizon. The line had vast gaps in it, astern of the
Bucentaure
for instance, and in places the ships had bunched two and three abreast.

He turned his attention to the British again at the same time as Villeneuve lowered his glass and noticed his arrival. ‘Ah, Captain Drinkwater. I desire your opinion as to the leading ships . . .' He handed Drinkwater his glass.

Drinkwater focused the telescope and the image leapt into the lenses with unbelievable clarity. The two groups of British ships were led by three-deckers. These ships were going to receive the brunt of the fire of several broadsides before they could retaliate and Drinkwater sensed a certain elation amongst the officers on
Bucentaure
's quarterdeck. They came on like a row of skittles, one behind the other. Knock the end one over and it would take them all down.

As he watched, flags soared up to the mastheads and out to the yardarms of the leading British ships. Between the two groups he could see the frigates
Naiad, Euryalus, Siruis
and
Phoebe
, a cutter and schooner, standing by to repeat signals or tow a wounded battleship out of the line.

‘Well, Captain?' Villeneuve was reminding him he was a prisoner and had been asked a question. He looked again at the leading ships. They had every stitch of sail set, their studding sails winged out on the booms, their slack sheets trailing in the water. The swell made the great ships pitch gently as they came on, their hulls black and yellow barred, their decorated figureheads bright with paintwork. The southern group was further advanced than the northern column. He closed the telescope with a snap.

‘The southern column is led by
Royal Soveriegn
, Your Excellency, flagship of Vice-Admiral Collingwood . . .'

‘And Nelson?' Villeneuve's eagerness betrayed his anxiety.

‘There, sir,' Drinkwater pointed with Villeneuve's telescope, the brass instrument gleaming in the sunshine, ‘there is
Victory
, leading the northern column and bearing the flag of Lord Nelson.'

Villeneuve's hand was extended for his glass, but his eyes never left the black and yellow hull of
Victory
. As Drinkwater watched, the ship astern of
Victory
seemed to edge out of line, as if making to overtake. Then he saw her sails shake and she disappeared from view behind the flagship again. ‘She seems to be supported by the
Téméraire
,' he added, ‘of ninety-eight guns.'

Bucentaure
's officers studied the menacing approach of the silent British ships. All along her own decks animated chatter had broken out. He noticed there was no check put to this and the men seemed in high spirits now that action was inevitable. Aware that at any moment he would be ordered below, he again looked round. The gap
astern was a yawning invitation to the British, and Drinkwater's practised eye soon reckoned that
Victory
was heading for that gap. Collingwood, he judged, would strike the allied line well astern of the
Bucentaure
, somewhere about the position of the funereal black hull of the Spanish 112-gun
Santa Ana
with her scarlet figurehead of the saint. Ahead of the
Bucentaure
the mighty
Santissima Trinidad
, with her hull of red and white ribbands, seemed to wait placidly for the onslaught of the heretic fleet, a great wooden cross hanging over her stern beneath the red and gold ensign of Spain.

‘Nelson attacks as I said he would, Captain,' Villeneuve remarked in English. And added, as his glass raked the following ships crowding down astern of their leaders, ‘It is not that Nelson leads, but that every captain thinks
he
is Nelson . . .' Then, in his own tongue and in a tone of anguish he said, ‘
Où est Gravina?
'

Drinkwater realised the import of the remark, forgotten in the excitement of watching the British fleet approach. By wearing to the northward, Villeneuve had reversed his order of sailing. The van was led by Dumanoir now. Instead of commanding a detached squadron to windward, Gravina was tailing on the end of the immense line. Villeneuve's counterstroke was destroyed!

Drinkwater's eyes met those of the French Commander-in-Chief, then Villeneuve looked away; Magendie was speaking impatiently to him and at that moment smoke belched from a ship well astern of
Bucentaure
. The rolling concussion of a broadside came over the water towards them as white plumes rose around the
Royal Sovereign
. Collingwood had shifted his flag from the sluggish
Dreadnought
to the swift and newly coppered
Royal Sovereign
as soon as she had come out from England. Now that speed carried her into battle ahead of her consorts and her chief. Soon other ships were trying the range along with the
Fougeuex
, smoke and flame belched from the side of the
Santa Ana
, and still the
Royal Sovereign
came on, her guns silent, her defiance expressed by the hoisting of additional colours in her rigging.

Drinkwater turned his attention to the other column. Much nearer now,
Victory
could be seen clearly, her lower fore-sheets trailing in the water as the lightness of the breeze wafted her down on the waiting
Bucentaure
.

Magendie barked something and Guillet tugged at Drinkwater's sleeve. He followed Guillet to the companionway. As he left the deck he heard the bells of several ships strikes the quadruple double ring of noon.

‘
Tirez
!'

As Drinkwater passed the lower gun-deck, Lieutenant Fournier gave the order to one of
Bucentaure
's 24-pounder cannon. It rumbled inboard with the recoil after the explosion of discharge, snatching at its breeching while its crew ministered to it, stuffing sponge, cartridge wad and ball into its smoking muzzle. The lieutenant leaned forward, peering through the gun-port to see where the ranging shot had fallen, and Drinkwater knew he was aiming at
Victory
. The first coils of white powder smoke drifted innocently around the beams of the deck above and its acrid smell was pungent.

Drinkwater descended into the orlop and made his way back, where he was greeted by a ring of expectant faces. Masson and his staff as well as Gillespy awaited news from the upper world.

‘M'sieur Masson, the allied fleets of France and Spain are being attacked by a British fleet under Lord Nelson . . .'

He heard the name ‘Nelson' repeated as men looked at one another, and then all hell broke loose above them.

For the next hours the world was an immensity of noise. The stygian darkness of the orlop, pitifully lit with its faint lanterns whose flames struggled in the foul air, became in its own way an extension of hell. But it was the aural senses that suffered the worst assault. Despite twenty-six years in the Royal Navy, Nathanel Drinkwater had never before experienced the ear-splitting horror of a sustained action in a ship larger than a frigate; never been subjected to the rolling waves of blasting concussion that reverberated in the confined space of a gun-deck and down into the orlop below. The guns belching their lethal projectiles leapt back on their carriages with an increasing eagerness as they heated up. They became like things with a life of their own. The shouts of their captains and the
aspirants
and officers who controlled them became nothing more than howls of servitude as the iron monsters spat smoke, fire and iron into the enemy. The stench of powder permeated the orlop, itself full of shuddering air, its shadows a-tremble from the vibrating lantern hooks as the
Bucentuare
flexed and quivered in response to her own violence. This was the moment for which she had been called into being, to resist force with force and pit iron against iron in a ruthless carnage of cacophonous death.

Initially the men stationed in the orlop had nothing to do. The surgeon and his mates waited for the first of the wounded to come down, the gunner and his staff peered from their shot and powder rooms, waiting for the first of the boys requiring more cartridges and shot. So far
Bucentaure
had shivered only from the discharge of her own
guns. In his imagination Drinkwater saw
Victory
looming ever larger as she made for that yawning gap astern of the French flagship. He tried to recall the two ships that were trying to fill it and thought that they should have been the
Neptune
and the Spanish
San Leandro
, but they were both to leeward, he remembered, and only Lucas in the
Redoubtable
was in direct line astern of the
Bucentaure
. Drinkwater felt a sympathy for Villeneuve. Gravina had let him down and now he went almost unsupported into action with a ship heavier than his own.
Bucentaure
was a new ship and
Victory
fifty years old, but the added elevation of her third gun-deck would make her a formidable opponent.

And then Drinkwater heard the most terrible sound of his life. The concussion was felt through the entire body rather than heard with the ears alone, a distant noise above the thunder of
Bucentaure
's cannon, a strange mixture of sounds that had about it the tinkle of imploding glass and the noise of a million bees driving down wind on the back of a hurricane. The whole of
Bucentaure
trembled, men standing were jerked slightly and the bees were followed by the whoosh and crash, the splintering, jarring shock of impact, as musket balls and double- and triple-shotted guns raked the whole length of the
Bucentaure
. It was over in a few seconds as
Victory
crossed their stern, pouring the pent-up fury of her hitherto silent guns through the
Bucentaure
's stern galleries and along her gun-decks, knocking men over like ninepins. It took cannon off their carriages too, for above their heads they heard the crash of guns hitting the deck, but by this time the orlop had its own terrible part to play.

As the first wave of that raking broadside receded, Drinkwater released Gillespy whom he found himself clasping protectively. He could not stand idle and tore off his coat as the first wounded were stretched upon the canvas of the operating ‘table'.

‘Come, Mr Gillespy, come; let us do something in the name of humanity to say we were not idle when brave men did their duty.'

Ghostly pale, Gillespy came forward and held the arm of a man while Masson excised a splinter from his shoulder and shoved him roughly aside. It took four men to hold some of the wounded who were filling the space like a human flood so that for a second Drinkwater imagined they might drown under the press of bloody bodies that seemed to inundate them. Men screamed or whimpered or stared hollow-eyed. Pain robbed them of the last protest as their lives drained out into the stinking bilge beneath them.

‘It is important we operate fast,' Masson shouted, the sweat
pouring from him as he wiped a smear of blood across his forehead. ‘Not him, Captain, he is too much gone . . . this man . . . ah, a leg . . . we must cut here . . .' The knife bit into the flesh, its passage marked by a line of blood, and Masson's practised wrist took the incision right around the limb, inclining the point towards the upper thigh.