Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (34 page)

For that ordeal—now imminent—Nelson summoned up all his art. The problem was to annihilate, for only annihilation would serve. Ever since he had learnt on that early September morning at Merton that Villeneuve had taken shelter in Cadiz he had been pondering how to destroy him. " I will try to have a motto," he told Rose before he left England, "or at least it shall be my watchword—

¹
Castle
reagh. V,
96-7, 110-11;
Barham, III, xxi, xxxli; Nicolas, VII,
61-2;
Corbett,
318;
Collingwood,
110-11.

* Corbe
tt,
328;
Nicolas, VII,
55;
Holland Rose,
Pitt and Napoleon,
151-2.
'

Touch and take!" He
had never been content with the
classic conception of a naval victory: an ordered cannonade in long,
laboriously formed lines of battle in which the French, receiving an attack from to windward were always able to withdraw., occasionally leaving a few prizes in British hands. A disciple of the great eighteenth century pioneers who had first had the courage to defy the Admiralty's Fighting Instructions and break the formal line of battle, and a lifelong student of naval tactics, Nelson had long wrestled with the problem of how to transform limited into decisive victory. As a Commodore at Cape St. Vincent, and then in his first independent command at the Nile, he had pointed the way. But never till now had he directed a major fleet in battle in the open sea.

On October
9th,
two days after his new orders reached him, he issued instructions to his flag officers and captains. He had already outlined them verbally in those two dramatic evenings in the
Victory's
cabin. He now committed them formally to writing. The problem, as he postulated it, was to bring such crushing force against a portion of the enemy's line as to overwhelm it and to do so in time to destroy the remainder before night fell. "Thinking it almost impossible," he wrote, " to bring a fleet of forty sail of the Line into a line of battle in variable winds, thick weather or other circumstances . . . without such a loss of time that the opportunity would probably be lost of bringing the enemy to battle in such manner as to make the business decisive, I have made up my mind . . . that the Order of Sailing is to be the Order of Battle." In other words not only was the classical line of battle to be discarded in the heat of the fight; as it had been in earlier engagements, but it was never to be formed at all.

The spirit of the offensive was implicit in every line of Nelson's Memorandum. So was his genius. It was, as Thursficld wrote, " the last tactical word of the greatest master of sea tactics the world has ever known, the final and flawless disposition of sailing-ships marshalled for combat."
¹
Attack was to be made in two main divisions, one of which was to immobilise the enemy's van by a feint while the other broke and destroyed his rear and centre. No time was to be wasted in manoeuvring for position, for with the brief October days and the uncertain winds of that region none could be spared; instead the approach was to be made by whatever course would most quickly bring the fleet to gunshot of the enemy's centre. Then one division under Collingwood was to break the enemy's line at about the twelfth ship from the rear, while the other, under Nelson's immediate command, after keeping the enemy's van in the

^l
Thursfield,
25. 162

maximum uncertainty as to its intentions by hovering to windward till it was too late to succour the rear, was to fall on the centre. "The whole impression of the British Fleet," Nelson wrote, "must be to overpower from two or three ships ahead of their Commander-in-Chief, supposed to be in the centre, to the rear of their fleet.
...
I
look with confidence to a victory before the van of the enemy can succour their rear." Their flagship was to be taken, and the battle was not be regarded as over so long as a single enemy ensign remained flying.

It was characteristic of Nelson that within the broad framework of his orders the maximum freedom of action was reserved both for himself and Collingwood. From the moment pursuit was joined the latter was to have complete control over his own division. No hard and fast tactical rules were laid down, for the precise conditions in which the enemy would be found could not be foreseen. "Something," Nelson wrote, "must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a sea fight." Individual captains were to look to their particular Line as their rallying-point. "In case," he added, "signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy."
¹

During the days that followed the issue of his Memorandum Nelson's main anxiety was lest the foe should escape through the Straits before his cruisers could warn him. As usual he was short of frigates: the last French fleet, he told the Admiralty, had slipped through his fingers that way and he was resolved that this one should not. Fortunately he had an apt disciple in the thirty-four year old frigate captain, Henry Blackwood. Much of his time, ' working like a horse in a mill' to complete the last detail of preparation, was spent in coaching this daring and vigilant officer. "Those who know more of Cadiz than either you or I do," Nelson wrote to him, "say that after these Levanters come several days of fine weather, sea breezes westerly, land wind at night; and that, if the enemy are bound into the Mediterranean, they would come'out at night, run to the southward and catch the sea breezes at the mouth of the Gut and push through whilst we might have little wind in the offing. In short, watch all points and all winds and weather, for I shall depend on you."
²

Nelson was co
nfident of his ability to defeat the enemy.
"I
will give them such a shaking," he told Blackwood, " as they have never yet experienced; at least I will lay down my life in the attempt." But he was growing increasingly anxious lest the reinforcements

¹
Nicolas, VII,
90-5;
Thursfield,
28,
36;
Taylor,
693;
Mark Kerr,
240.

²
Nicolas VII,
96.
Sec also
idem,
VII,
76;
Castlereagh, V,
116-17.

promised from England should not arrive in time to achieve complete annihilation. Louis with six of his battleships was still in the Straits, and he had now been forced by the needs of Malta and the Russians to send them farther eastward with a convoy past Cartagena. Others, however, despite the menace of Allemand to his supply lines, were straggling in as fast as Barham could dispatch them from the dockyards, and on the 13th the
Agamemnon
showed over the horizon with his old flag-captain, Berry, in command. " Now we shall have a fight," Nelson cried, rubbing his hands. The newcomer brought the immediate strength under his flag to twenty-seven of the line including seven three-deckers.

Yet the ships in Cadiz harbour continued to lie at their mo
orings, and Nelson began to wax
impatient.
"I
don't like to have these things on my mind," he told a friend in England. On the 17th the wind veered into the east again: the Combined Fleet could not have finer weather for sea. But still there was no sign of life from the bare forest of masts beyond the low thin strip of the isthmus.

Yet within the port, unknown to the blockaders, the enemy was stirring. On October nth, four days after the Council of War had decided not to fight, news arrived that Rosily was on his way to take over command and was already at Madrid. The idea of being superseded with the stigma of cowardice upon him was more than Villeneuve could bear. He knew that Louis was in the Straits: he did not yet know that reinforcements had arrived from England, for Nelson had been careful to conceal them. He therefore estimated British capital strength at 23 to his own 33, with an equal number of three-deckers on either side. Of these one, the Spanish
Santissima Trinidad,
carried 130 guns, and two others 112 guns against the 100 guns of the largest British ships.

Reckoning that an occasion so favourable would never come again, Villeneuve ordered the Fleet to sea. He would pass the Straits or perish. "There is nothing," he assured his captains, "to alarm us in the sight of the English fleet; they are not more brave than we are, they are worn by a two years' cruise and they have fewer motives to fight well." Having brooded so long over the thought of Nelson, he had formed a surprisingly accurate idea of what he would do. "The enemy," he wrote in his Fighting Instructions, "will not trouble to form line parallel to ours and fight it out with the gun. . . . He will try to double our rear, cut through the Line and bring against ships thus isolated groups of his own to surround and capture them. Captains must rely upon their courage and love of glory rather than upon the signals
of admirals who may be already
engaged and wrapped in smoke. The captain who is not in action is not at his post."
¹

The chivalrous Spaniards, aware that more than half their crews had never been to sea, protested but, for the honour of their flag, agreed to sail. Villeneuve was now inexorable. Just as the injured Calder had taken his flagship home to Portsmouth to appease his honour, the French Admiral to vindicate his took his whole Fleet into the jaws of destruction.

At six o'clock on the morning of Saturday, October
19th,
the
Sirius,
Blackwood's nearest frigate inshore, gave the longed-for signal. " Enemy have their topsail yards hoisted.". An hour later the first ships were reported coming out of harbour. At half-past nine Nelson received the news fifty miles out in the Atlantic. At once the signal was hoisted for a " General Chase," followed soon afterwards by "Prepare for Battle." All day the British Fleet stood towards the Straits under a clear sky with a north-easterly win
d, intending to catch Villeneuve
at the entrance to the Gut. Though during the afternoon the wind began to drop, the enemy's fleet was reported at sea. "How would your heart beat for me, dearest Jane," wrote Codrington to his wife, "did you but know that we are now under every stitch of sail we can set, steering for the enemy."
²

Yet by one o'clock on the morning of the 20th, when the Fleet began to close on Gibraltar, there was no sign of the foe. Dawn broke on an empty solitude of thick, squally sea and cloud, with the fine weather of the previous day gone and with it Codrington's dream of a general engagement, a glorious victory and a quick return to England. "All our gay hopes are fled," he wrote, "and instead of being under all possible sail in a very light breeze and fine weather, expecting to bring the enemy to battle, we are now under close-reefed topsails in a very strong wind with thick rainy weather and the dastardly French returned to Cadiz."
³
To add to the general disappointment there was no sign of Louis, whom Nelson had hoped to find in the Straits, that officer being now far away to the east, receding to his own intense chagrin and that of his crews in the direction of Malta.

¹
Desbriere,
The Campaign
of
Trafalgar
(transl. Eastwick), II,
131.

²
Codrington.
57.
"And so, dear, I shall wish thee once more a good-night and that thy husband's conduct in the hour of battle may prove worthy of thee and thy children." Earlier in the day Nelson had written to Emma in something of the same strain: "May the God of Battles crown my endeavour with success; at all events I will take care that my name shall ever be most dear to you and Horatia."—Nicolas, VII,
132.

³
Codrington,
58;
Corbctt,
335-7;
Nicolas, VII,
132.

Yet just as Nelson was about to beat back to his old station for fear of being driven by the south-wester through the Straits, word came from the frigates that Villeneuve
was still at sea to the north
ward and that a group of his ships had just been sighted in some confusion off Cadiz lighthouse. The Combined Fleet's seamanship had proved unequal to the task of getting out of harbour in a single tide, but the ships
w
ere
still coming out. Nelson, therefore, after giving orders to wear and stand to
the north-west, called Colling
wood aboard for consultation. But, though he listened to his. eager advice to attack at once, he refused to do so. For, if he was to gain the victory on which he counted, he knew that he must let his foe get farther away from port. He dared not trust his courage with a bolt-hole.