Post by Chips on Oct 29, 2010 16:41:10 GMT 9.5
The horror (and heroism) at Trafalgar: Last week a letter revealed the brutal life of an ordinary seaman in Nelson's navy. Here, the creator of Sharp recreates the carnage below decks
By Bernard Cornwerll
Last updated at 5:29 AM on 29th October 2010
With her rigging wreathed in clouds of smoke and her vast hull reverberating with the thunder of gunfire, HMS Victory seemed doomed.
A sharp-shooter’s bullet had left Admiral Lord Nelson dying on her lower decks and now his beloved flagship was about to be seized by the Redoutable, the French man o’ war from which the fatal shot had been fired.
All that remained was for Capitaine Jean-Jacques Lucas’s crew to throw a bridge across to the Victory and assault her with muskets, axes, boarding-pikes and bayonets.
Death of a hero: The Daniel Maclise's painting of the fall of Lord Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar
But, seconds away from their onslaught, the British warship HMS Temeraire sailed across the Redoutable’s stern and delivered a broadside which ripped the heart out of the best-trained ship in the French navy.
It is hard to imagine the carnage caused by that fusillade, perhaps the most destructive in naval history. Close to one-third of the Redoutable’s crew were slaughtered by the cannonballs and 68-pounder carronades which, like giant shotguns, ripped into the men crowded on her upper deck. By the time Lucas surrendered his ship, perhaps an hour later, only 156 of her crew of 643 men were left alive.
The Temeraire lost only 47 dead out of 755 men, a measure of British naval superiority at Trafalgar.
For the past two centuries our view of this celebrated victory has been shaped by the memoirs of officers who were present. But this month — as Trafalgar Day was celebrated — a refreshing new account emerged in the form of a letter acquired by the National Maritime Museum.
Portrait: Lord Horatio Nelson in his pomp
It was donated by the descendants of Robert Hope, a 28-year-old sail-maker from Kent who was aboard the Temeraire that memorable day. Writing to his brother John on November 4, 1805, two weeks after the battle, he is clearly immensely proud of the Royal Navy’s success.
‘What do you think of us Lads of the Sea now?’ he asks, before dismissing the enemy. ‘I think they won’t send their fleets out again in a hurry.’
Such first-hand accounts by rank-and-file sailors are extremely rare, as I found out ten years ago while researching my novel Sharpe’s Trafalgar, and this letter makes particularly fascinating reading.
Other testimonies make much of Lord Nelson’s death, and rightly so, for this brilliant and much-loved leader was the greatest Admiral who ever lived. But his demise is not referred to at all in Hope’s letter.
This is not surprising. For sailors like Hope, their own ship and the comrades immediately around them were their whole world, and a dangerous world it was, even when they were not engaged in battle.
Only about 10 per cent of injuries and deaths aboard British warships during this period could be blamed on enemy action. Most were down to sickness and accident, and there was considerable scope for both aboard a warship.
While the Temeraire’s senior officers had spacious and luxurious quarters, resplendent with expensive furniture, most of the crew were crammed into the dark and permanently damp decks below. They included the midshipmen, the lowest rank of officer, whose cabins were barely bigger than dog kennels. But even these were spacious compared with the accommodation afforded the lower ranks.
They worked watches of four hours on and four hours off, snatching sleep in hammocks only 18 inches wide. Although uncomfortable, this was at least relatively safe, unlike the conditions up on deck.
The risks were particularly high for the topmen who climbed the rigging with gale-force winds shrieking in their ears. Many were blown to their deaths. But the worst duty was on the bowsprit, a long spar projecting from the front of the ship and known as the ‘widow-maker’, because any man who fell from it would be sucked under the hull and drowned.
Nowadays, of course, the little Hitlers of the Health and Safety industry would forbid such work, and we would all be speaking French instead of English.
Those who survived such hazardous work faced other dangers, including poor diet. Every week, alongside 2lb of peas, each man was allowed 4lb of beef and 2lb of pork, but this was heavily salted and reportedly tasted as tough and stringy as leather.
Their weekly 12oz ration of cheese was often infested with red worms and even their ‘hard tacks’, as biscuits were known, were not safe. In a letter home, one midshipman described biting into a weevil — it tasted, he said, like blancmange.
Each day the men looked forward to their allocated half a pint of rum, diluted with three parts of water to make grog. If spirits weren’t available, they had to make do with a pint of beer instead.
By the time Robert Hope joined the crew of the Temeraire, this was supplemented by lemon juice to provide the vitamin C newly proven to prevent scurvy. But other diseases, such as dysentery, still flourished as huge crews were crammed into wooden ships stinking of unwashed bodies, tobacco, tar, sewage and rot.
Nobody would have been more aware of the high mortality rates than sail-makers such as Robert Hope, whose job included helping to dispose of the dead.
Nelson was the most predatory Commander since Francis Drake. He had long dreamed of annihilating Britain's enemies at sea
Each officer slept in a wooden cot which became a coffin in the event of his death, a piece of sail-cloth placed over the top as an impromptu lid. The bodies of ordinary sailors were simply sewn into their hammocks.
And, as a final check for all ranks, the sail-maker placed the shroud’s last stitch through the corpse’s nose. If there was no reaction, as was invariably the case, he was buried at sea.
In the run-up to the Battle of Trafalgar, life was all the harder for Nelson’s men. Amid fears that Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte planned an invasion of England with the help of his Spanish allies, the British mounted blockades on the major French ports.
As planned, this prevented the French fleet, under the command of Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, from heading for the English Channel. But it meant that the average Jack Tar spent many months out at sea, with only the prostitutes often smuggled on board for light relief.
This did, however, give the British a great advantage. While it was impossible for the French to train their gunners in port, for fear of firing on their own ships, Nelson’s men spent many hours practising their drills on the open seas.
Consequently, they could discharge and reload their guns at a rate of one round every two minutes, twice or even three times as fast as their swiftest French counterparts. They were also the only navy equipped with deadly carronades, lightweight guns nicknamed ‘smashers’ because of the destruction they caused at close range.
Under fire: 'The Battle of Trafalgar' -painting by Clarkson Stanfield
Nelson was the most predatory Navy commander since Francis
Drake. He had long dreamed of annihilating Britain’s enemies at sea and his chance came closer in March 1805 when the French took advantage of bad weather conditions to escape their captors and rendezvous with their Spanish allies. It was not a good idea.
After a long chase, lasting several months, the opposing sides finally faced each other off Cape Trafalgar in Southern Spain, and preparations for battle began. These would have been much the same on Nelson’s 27 ships and Villeneuve’s 33, with the surgeons setting up their temporary operating theatres on the orlop decks below the waterline. Here, in theory at least, they were safe from enemy fire.
Ropes were coiled on the floor to serve as makeshift mattresses for those waiting their turn on the operating table, and it was said that on some ships the orlop walls were painted red so that the blood spattered over them did not show.
There would certainly have been plenty of gore to hide, good doctors priding themselves on removing a man’s leg in under a minute, an unbearably painful process for patients whose only anaesthetic was a swig of rum.
Nelson did not want to defeat the enemy, he wanted to obliterate them. His plan was to carve through the Franco-Spanish fleet like a spear
Sand was scattered on the gun decks just above the orlop, to give the gunners’ bare feet a better grip, but also to absorb the blood which would inevitably flow once the fighting began. And with all that done, it was time for the men to write their wills and goodbye letters to their loved ones.
Those who could not read or write relied on comrades like Robert Hope to undertake these final tasks for them before they took their places at their guns.
Stripped to the waist in the infernal heat below decks, their backs sometimes bearing the scars of floggings for previous misdemeanours, the men wrapped scarves around their heads to protect their ears from the pounding of the cannons. Not surprisingly, most went prematurely deaf.
Tradition dictated that ships should fight each other side-on, broadside to broadside, but Nelson did not want to defeat the enemy, he wanted to obliterate them. His plan was to carve through the Franco-Spanish fleet like a spear slashing through a shield wall. Only then, by firing his ships’ massive broadsides lengthwise down the enemy vessels, could he inflict the maximum damage.
Since their guns were ranged along their sides, this meant that Nelson’s ships would be unable to return fire until they had breached the enemy line — but he had supreme faith in his men’s fighting abilities.
To cause maximum confusion he had divided the British fleet into two columns; one squadron of 15 ships led by Admiral Charles Collingwood attacked the rear of the enemy line, while the remaining 12, headed by Nelson on HMS Victory, made for the front.
Cannon fodder: Cannon balls from the French ships made a holey mess of Lord Nelson's flagship HMS Victory
The day of the battle, October 21, was one of little wind and low swell, and the two British columns sailed with agonising slowness towards the enemy, who opened fire at least 20 minutes before the British were able to return the compliment.
On the Victory, leading the northerly British column, the men were ordered to lie down to limit casualties. Bands played on foredecks as the enemy shots screamed and slapped and shattered and splashed.
And the closer the British ships drew to the enemy, the more intense the fire. Men were dying, and still the Royal Navy could not retaliate.
Shortly after 1pm, Victory finally pierced the enemy line. Her first victim was the French flagship, the Bucentaure, which lost close to a quarter of her crew under the impact of the Victory’s opening broadside.
It was an impressive start, but then Capitaine Lucas, who had drilled his men in close-quarter fighting and whose dream was to board and capture Nelson’s flagship, saw his chance and laid the Redoutable alongside the Victory.
It was more than possible that his ferociously well-trained crew could have captured her, but Lucas never saw the Temeraire approach. Her broadside turned his hopes to blood, splintered bones and screams.
Laying herself alongside Lucas’s shattered ship, the Temeraire was assailed by a second French vessel, the Fougeux.
There were now four ships lashed together, firing into each other — the Victory, Redoutable, Temeraire and Fougeux.
Renovation: Restoration work goes on HMS Victory at the Royal Navy base in Portsmouth
They kept a very hot fire for some time,’ Robert Hope wrote to his brother, ‘but we soon cooled them in the height of the smoke. Our men from the upper decks boarded them both at the same time and soon carried the day.’
The Redoutable and the Fougeux both surrendered to the Temeraire and, by nightfall, 17 of the enemy ships had struck their colours, while one other had been destroyed by fire. Nelson had secured British maritime dominance for the next century, though for men like Robert Hope all that mattered was the miracle of coming through unscathed.
‘This is with my love to you,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘Hoping it will find you in good health as I bless God I am at present.’
So far, we know little else about Hope, whether he was married, or whether he lived to see J. M. W. Turner’s famous work The Fighting Temeraire, completed in 1839 and still regularly voted one of the nation’s favourite artworks.
As anyone who has seen that picture will know, it depicts the ship as an ethereal, ghostlike beauty being towed by a squat, dark smoky steam-tug on her final voyage to the breaker’s yard.
Now, as politicians destroy the Royal Navy with economic cuts, it is good to rediscover Robert Hope’s letter, a reminder of the Temeraire’s glory days — and a time when Whitehall understood that Britain is an island, and an island needs a navy.
The Fort by Bernard Cornwell is published by Harper Collins at 18.99
By Bernard Cornwerll
Last updated at 5:29 AM on 29th October 2010
With her rigging wreathed in clouds of smoke and her vast hull reverberating with the thunder of gunfire, HMS Victory seemed doomed.
A sharp-shooter’s bullet had left Admiral Lord Nelson dying on her lower decks and now his beloved flagship was about to be seized by the Redoutable, the French man o’ war from which the fatal shot had been fired.
All that remained was for Capitaine Jean-Jacques Lucas’s crew to throw a bridge across to the Victory and assault her with muskets, axes, boarding-pikes and bayonets.
Death of a hero: The Daniel Maclise's painting of the fall of Lord Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar
But, seconds away from their onslaught, the British warship HMS Temeraire sailed across the Redoutable’s stern and delivered a broadside which ripped the heart out of the best-trained ship in the French navy.
It is hard to imagine the carnage caused by that fusillade, perhaps the most destructive in naval history. Close to one-third of the Redoutable’s crew were slaughtered by the cannonballs and 68-pounder carronades which, like giant shotguns, ripped into the men crowded on her upper deck. By the time Lucas surrendered his ship, perhaps an hour later, only 156 of her crew of 643 men were left alive.
The Temeraire lost only 47 dead out of 755 men, a measure of British naval superiority at Trafalgar.
For the past two centuries our view of this celebrated victory has been shaped by the memoirs of officers who were present. But this month — as Trafalgar Day was celebrated — a refreshing new account emerged in the form of a letter acquired by the National Maritime Museum.
Portrait: Lord Horatio Nelson in his pomp
It was donated by the descendants of Robert Hope, a 28-year-old sail-maker from Kent who was aboard the Temeraire that memorable day. Writing to his brother John on November 4, 1805, two weeks after the battle, he is clearly immensely proud of the Royal Navy’s success.
‘What do you think of us Lads of the Sea now?’ he asks, before dismissing the enemy. ‘I think they won’t send their fleets out again in a hurry.’
Such first-hand accounts by rank-and-file sailors are extremely rare, as I found out ten years ago while researching my novel Sharpe’s Trafalgar, and this letter makes particularly fascinating reading.
Other testimonies make much of Lord Nelson’s death, and rightly so, for this brilliant and much-loved leader was the greatest Admiral who ever lived. But his demise is not referred to at all in Hope’s letter.
This is not surprising. For sailors like Hope, their own ship and the comrades immediately around them were their whole world, and a dangerous world it was, even when they were not engaged in battle.
Only about 10 per cent of injuries and deaths aboard British warships during this period could be blamed on enemy action. Most were down to sickness and accident, and there was considerable scope for both aboard a warship.
While the Temeraire’s senior officers had spacious and luxurious quarters, resplendent with expensive furniture, most of the crew were crammed into the dark and permanently damp decks below. They included the midshipmen, the lowest rank of officer, whose cabins were barely bigger than dog kennels. But even these were spacious compared with the accommodation afforded the lower ranks.
They worked watches of four hours on and four hours off, snatching sleep in hammocks only 18 inches wide. Although uncomfortable, this was at least relatively safe, unlike the conditions up on deck.
The risks were particularly high for the topmen who climbed the rigging with gale-force winds shrieking in their ears. Many were blown to their deaths. But the worst duty was on the bowsprit, a long spar projecting from the front of the ship and known as the ‘widow-maker’, because any man who fell from it would be sucked under the hull and drowned.
Nowadays, of course, the little Hitlers of the Health and Safety industry would forbid such work, and we would all be speaking French instead of English.
Those who survived such hazardous work faced other dangers, including poor diet. Every week, alongside 2lb of peas, each man was allowed 4lb of beef and 2lb of pork, but this was heavily salted and reportedly tasted as tough and stringy as leather.
Their weekly 12oz ration of cheese was often infested with red worms and even their ‘hard tacks’, as biscuits were known, were not safe. In a letter home, one midshipman described biting into a weevil — it tasted, he said, like blancmange.
Each day the men looked forward to their allocated half a pint of rum, diluted with three parts of water to make grog. If spirits weren’t available, they had to make do with a pint of beer instead.
By the time Robert Hope joined the crew of the Temeraire, this was supplemented by lemon juice to provide the vitamin C newly proven to prevent scurvy. But other diseases, such as dysentery, still flourished as huge crews were crammed into wooden ships stinking of unwashed bodies, tobacco, tar, sewage and rot.
Nobody would have been more aware of the high mortality rates than sail-makers such as Robert Hope, whose job included helping to dispose of the dead.
Nelson was the most predatory Commander since Francis Drake. He had long dreamed of annihilating Britain's enemies at sea
Each officer slept in a wooden cot which became a coffin in the event of his death, a piece of sail-cloth placed over the top as an impromptu lid. The bodies of ordinary sailors were simply sewn into their hammocks.
And, as a final check for all ranks, the sail-maker placed the shroud’s last stitch through the corpse’s nose. If there was no reaction, as was invariably the case, he was buried at sea.
In the run-up to the Battle of Trafalgar, life was all the harder for Nelson’s men. Amid fears that Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte planned an invasion of England with the help of his Spanish allies, the British mounted blockades on the major French ports.
As planned, this prevented the French fleet, under the command of Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, from heading for the English Channel. But it meant that the average Jack Tar spent many months out at sea, with only the prostitutes often smuggled on board for light relief.
This did, however, give the British a great advantage. While it was impossible for the French to train their gunners in port, for fear of firing on their own ships, Nelson’s men spent many hours practising their drills on the open seas.
Consequently, they could discharge and reload their guns at a rate of one round every two minutes, twice or even three times as fast as their swiftest French counterparts. They were also the only navy equipped with deadly carronades, lightweight guns nicknamed ‘smashers’ because of the destruction they caused at close range.
Under fire: 'The Battle of Trafalgar' -painting by Clarkson Stanfield
Nelson was the most predatory Navy commander since Francis
Drake. He had long dreamed of annihilating Britain’s enemies at sea and his chance came closer in March 1805 when the French took advantage of bad weather conditions to escape their captors and rendezvous with their Spanish allies. It was not a good idea.
After a long chase, lasting several months, the opposing sides finally faced each other off Cape Trafalgar in Southern Spain, and preparations for battle began. These would have been much the same on Nelson’s 27 ships and Villeneuve’s 33, with the surgeons setting up their temporary operating theatres on the orlop decks below the waterline. Here, in theory at least, they were safe from enemy fire.
Ropes were coiled on the floor to serve as makeshift mattresses for those waiting their turn on the operating table, and it was said that on some ships the orlop walls were painted red so that the blood spattered over them did not show.
There would certainly have been plenty of gore to hide, good doctors priding themselves on removing a man’s leg in under a minute, an unbearably painful process for patients whose only anaesthetic was a swig of rum.
Nelson did not want to defeat the enemy, he wanted to obliterate them. His plan was to carve through the Franco-Spanish fleet like a spear
Sand was scattered on the gun decks just above the orlop, to give the gunners’ bare feet a better grip, but also to absorb the blood which would inevitably flow once the fighting began. And with all that done, it was time for the men to write their wills and goodbye letters to their loved ones.
Those who could not read or write relied on comrades like Robert Hope to undertake these final tasks for them before they took their places at their guns.
Stripped to the waist in the infernal heat below decks, their backs sometimes bearing the scars of floggings for previous misdemeanours, the men wrapped scarves around their heads to protect their ears from the pounding of the cannons. Not surprisingly, most went prematurely deaf.
Tradition dictated that ships should fight each other side-on, broadside to broadside, but Nelson did not want to defeat the enemy, he wanted to obliterate them. His plan was to carve through the Franco-Spanish fleet like a spear slashing through a shield wall. Only then, by firing his ships’ massive broadsides lengthwise down the enemy vessels, could he inflict the maximum damage.
Since their guns were ranged along their sides, this meant that Nelson’s ships would be unable to return fire until they had breached the enemy line — but he had supreme faith in his men’s fighting abilities.
To cause maximum confusion he had divided the British fleet into two columns; one squadron of 15 ships led by Admiral Charles Collingwood attacked the rear of the enemy line, while the remaining 12, headed by Nelson on HMS Victory, made for the front.
Cannon fodder: Cannon balls from the French ships made a holey mess of Lord Nelson's flagship HMS Victory
The day of the battle, October 21, was one of little wind and low swell, and the two British columns sailed with agonising slowness towards the enemy, who opened fire at least 20 minutes before the British were able to return the compliment.
On the Victory, leading the northerly British column, the men were ordered to lie down to limit casualties. Bands played on foredecks as the enemy shots screamed and slapped and shattered and splashed.
And the closer the British ships drew to the enemy, the more intense the fire. Men were dying, and still the Royal Navy could not retaliate.
Shortly after 1pm, Victory finally pierced the enemy line. Her first victim was the French flagship, the Bucentaure, which lost close to a quarter of her crew under the impact of the Victory’s opening broadside.
It was an impressive start, but then Capitaine Lucas, who had drilled his men in close-quarter fighting and whose dream was to board and capture Nelson’s flagship, saw his chance and laid the Redoutable alongside the Victory.
It was more than possible that his ferociously well-trained crew could have captured her, but Lucas never saw the Temeraire approach. Her broadside turned his hopes to blood, splintered bones and screams.
Laying herself alongside Lucas’s shattered ship, the Temeraire was assailed by a second French vessel, the Fougeux.
There were now four ships lashed together, firing into each other — the Victory, Redoutable, Temeraire and Fougeux.
Renovation: Restoration work goes on HMS Victory at the Royal Navy base in Portsmouth
They kept a very hot fire for some time,’ Robert Hope wrote to his brother, ‘but we soon cooled them in the height of the smoke. Our men from the upper decks boarded them both at the same time and soon carried the day.’
The Redoutable and the Fougeux both surrendered to the Temeraire and, by nightfall, 17 of the enemy ships had struck their colours, while one other had been destroyed by fire. Nelson had secured British maritime dominance for the next century, though for men like Robert Hope all that mattered was the miracle of coming through unscathed.
‘This is with my love to you,’ he wrote to his brother. ‘Hoping it will find you in good health as I bless God I am at present.’
So far, we know little else about Hope, whether he was married, or whether he lived to see J. M. W. Turner’s famous work The Fighting Temeraire, completed in 1839 and still regularly voted one of the nation’s favourite artworks.
As anyone who has seen that picture will know, it depicts the ship as an ethereal, ghostlike beauty being towed by a squat, dark smoky steam-tug on her final voyage to the breaker’s yard.
Now, as politicians destroy the Royal Navy with economic cuts, it is good to rediscover Robert Hope’s letter, a reminder of the Temeraire’s glory days — and a time when Whitehall understood that Britain is an island, and an island needs a navy.
The Fort by Bernard Cornwell is published by Harper Collins at 18.99