Men of Honour Read Free Page A

delivered apocalyptic violence, who looked on battle not as a necessary evil but as a moment of revelation and truth. For James Martin, a 26-year-old able seaman on the Neptune , ‘Now the moment was fast advancing which was to Decidewether the Boasted Herosum of France and Spain or the Ginene Valour of free Born Britains was to Rule the Main…Death or Victory was the Gineral Resolution of our Ships Crew.’
    In that light, the story of the British victory at Trafalgar is of a fleet of ships and men who, in a heroic mould, part Greek, part Roman, part Hebrew—the three-pronged roots of European violence—both dared to seize the fire and to use their apocalyptic inheritance as the fuel for lives of honour.

Part I
Morning
    October 21st 1805 5.50 am to 12.30 pm

1
Zeal
    October 21st 1805
5.50 am to 8.30 am
    Distance between fleets: 10 miles-6.5 miles
Victory ’s heading and speed: 067°-078° at 3 knots
    Zeal: passionate ardour for any cause
S AMUEL J OHNSON , A Dictionary of the English Language , 1755
    At 5.50 on the morning of 21 October 1805, just as dawn was coming up, the look-outs high on the mainmasts of the British fleet spied the enemy, about twelve miles away downwind. They had been tracking them for a day and a night, the body of their force kept carefully over the horizon, not only to prevent the French and Spanish taking fright and running from battle, but to remain upwind, ‘keeping the weather gage’, holding the trump card with which they would control and direct the battle to come. All night long, British frigates, stationed between the two fleets, had been burning pairs of blue lights, every hour on the hour, as pre-arranged. It was the agreed signal that the enemy was standing to the south, just as was wanted, straight into the jaws of the British guns.
    Twenty minutes after the first sighting in the light of dawn, Nelson signalled to the fleet: ‘Form order of sailingin two columns.’ This was the attack formation in which he had instructed his captains over the preceding weeks. His next signal, at 06.22, confirmed what they all knew was inevitable: ‘Prepare for battle’. Twenty minutes after that, the French frigate Hermione, standing out to the west of her own battle fleet, peering into the dark of the retreating night, signalled to her flagship, the Bucentaure : ‘The enemy in sight to windward.’ For all 47,000 men afloat that morning, it felt like a day of destiny and decision. Most ships in both fleets were already cleared for action.
    The French and Spanish were about twelve miles and the British about twenty-two miles off the coast of southwest Spain. The nearest point was Cape Trafalgar, an Arabic name, meaning the Point of the Cave, Taraf-al-Ghar. From the very top, the truck, of the highest masts in the British fleet, two hundred feet above the sea, you could just make out the blue smoky hills standing inland towards Seville. The wind was a light northwesterly, perhaps no more than Force 2 or 3, blowing at about 10 knots, but that was enough. A man-of-war would sail with a breeze so slight it could just be felt on the windward side of a licked finger. On the day of the battle, only the very largest ship, the vast Spanish four-decker, the Santísima Trinidad, did not respond to her helm. Most had just enough steerage way to manoeuvre. The sky was a pale, Neapolitan blue, with a few high clouds, and it was warm for the autumn. By midday, the Spanish meteorologists, recording the temperature in the Royal Observatory just outside Cadiz, would log 21° Celsius, about 70° Fahrenheit. In all ships in both fleets, men would strip to the waist. There was only one ominous element to the weather: a long, stirring swell was pushing in from the southwest, ‘the dog before its master’, the sign of a big Atlantic storm to come.
    Twenty-six British ships-of-the-line were bearing down from to-windward. One more, the Africa , captained