The Royal Navy Vice-Admiral Who Defeated the Combined French and Spanish Fleets Off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 and Was Shot Through the Spine During the Battle

By autumn 1805 Napoleon Bonaparte had assembled an invasion army of approximately 200,000 men at Boulogne on the French Channel coast. The invasion of England required temporary naval control of the English Channel for the period necessary to ferry the army across. The combined French and Spanish fleets — about 33 ships of the line — were to break out of the Atlantic ports, sweep the Channel clear of British naval opposition, and provide the protective cover.

The British Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets had been blockading the combined fleet in the Spanish port of Cadiz since August 1805 under the command of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who had taken command from Admiral Calder. The combined fleet under the French Vice-Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve broke out of Cadiz on 19 October 1805, with orders from Paris to sail north and join Napoleon’s invasion plan. Nelson intercepted on the morning of 21 October 1805 off Cape Trafalgar on the southwestern Spanish coast.

The British fleet was 27 ships of the line against Villeneuve’s 33. The British advantage was seamanship — Royal Navy crews had been at sea continuously through the blockade summer, the combined French-Spanish crews had been in port — and Nelson’s specifically aggressive tactical doctrine.

The plan

Conventional 18th-century fleet engagement doctrine was the line of battle: opposing fleets sailed parallel courses approximately a mile apart and exchanged broadsides until one fleet was disabled enough to withdraw. The pattern produced indecisive engagements; the rear ships of each line were rarely engaged, and damaged ships could limp away under cover of the line’s smoke.

Nelson’s plan at Trafalgar — outlined in his Memorandum of 9 October 1805 — was different. He divided his fleet into two columns and sailed them directly into the enemy line at right angles. Each British column would cut through the enemy line near its centre, isolate the central enemy ships from the van and rear, and engage them at close range from both sides. The British van of each column would absorb damage during the approach; the British rear of each column would arrive fresh against an already-engaged enemy.

The plan depended on superior British gunnery and seamanship in the close-range melee that would follow the cutting of the enemy line. It also depended on disciplined British acceptance of damage during the unanswered approach.

Nelson commanded the windward column from the 100-gun HMS Victory. Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood commanded the lee column from HMS Royal Sovereign. The two columns approached the enemy line in line-ahead at approximately 11 a.m. on 21 October.

The battle

The Royal Sovereign reached the enemy line first at approximately 12:05 p.m. and cut between the Spanish ships Santa Ana and Fougueux. The Victory followed about ten minutes later and broke through between the French flagship Bucentaure and the Redoutable.

Nelson’s pre-battle signal — flagged from the Victory’s masthead at approximately 11:45 a.m. — was the famous “England expects that every man will do his duty.” The signal had been edited by Nelson’s flag-captain Henry Blackwood from Nelson’s original draft of “England confides that every man will do his duty” — Blackwood had objected that “confides” required eight flags to spell while “expects” required only seven, and battle was minutes away.

The melee around the cut-through points was the most intense small-ship combat of the entire Napoleonic Wars. At approximately 1:15 p.m. a French marine sharpshooter on the mizzenmast top of the Redoutable — at a range of approximately 15 metres — shot Nelson through the left shoulder. The musket ball travelled downward through the lung and severed the spine at the seventh thoracic vertebra.

Nelson fell. His flag-captain Thomas Hardy had been walking beside him on the quarterdeck and was unhurt. Nelson said immediately, “They have done for me at last, Hardy.” Hardy initially disputed the assessment. Nelson said, “I hope not — my backbone is shot through.”

He was carried below to the cockpit. The surgeon William Beatty examined the wound within minutes and confirmed the spinal-cord severance. Nothing could be done. Nelson remained conscious for approximately three hours.

What he saw

The Victory had captured the Bucentaure and disabled the Redoutable by 2:30 p.m. The combined Franco-Spanish line had collapsed by 3:00 p.m. Nelson, who could no longer move below the chest, was kept informed by Beatty and Hardy of the developing victory. He repeatedly asked for casualty counts and for the names of the captured French and Spanish ships.

By approximately 4:00 p.m. the engagement was effectively over. The British had captured or destroyed 17 of the 33 enemy ships of the line. A further 5 surrendered the following day and 5 more were captured in a subsequent engagement on 22 October. Combined French-Spanish losses were 22 ships of the line, approximately 3,500 dead, and approximately 8,000 captured. British losses were 0 ships of the line lost, approximately 450 dead, and approximately 1,200 wounded.

Nelson died at approximately 4:30 p.m. Beatty’s contemporary account records his last specifically intelligible words as a quiet repeated “Thank God I have done my duty.” Earlier in the same period he had said to Hardy “Kiss me, Hardy” — a request the modern reader interprets in modern terms and the contemporary one interpreted in the conventional pre-Victorian intimate-male-friendship manner of the period. Hardy kissed Nelson’s cheek and forehead.

He was 47.

The brandy cask

The Victory began the voyage back to England the following day. Nelson’s body had to be preserved for the three-week voyage in summer Mediterranean conditions. Beatty had the body placed in a tall lead-lined coffin filled with brandy as a preservation medium. The brandy was supplemented with camphor and myrrh during stops at Gibraltar. The body remained preserved across the entire voyage.

The Victory reached Portsmouth on 6 December 1805. The body was transferred to the dockyard hospital and prepared for the state funeral. The state funeral on 9 January 1806 at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, was attended by 30 admirals, 100 captains, and an estimated 32,000 official mourners. Nelson’s body was buried in a sarcophagus directly beneath the central dome of St Paul’s. The sarcophagus had originally been carved in the 1520s for Cardinal Wolsey by the Italian Renaissance sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano; Wolsey’s fall from grace in 1530 had left it unused; it had been in storage at Windsor for 275 years.

The Trafalgar engagement ended the French naval invasion threat to Britain. Napoleon abandoned the Boulogne invasion army in late October 1805 and marched it east instead for the Austerlitz campaign that he won on 2 December 1805. The Channel remained under Royal Navy control for the rest of the Napoleonic Wars.

Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, central London, was built between 1840 and 1843. Its height — 169 feet 3 inches — was specified to match the original 1805 fleet rendezvous signal flagged from the Victory at Cadiz before the battle. The column had been funded by public subscription; 30 percent of the initial subscribers were Royal Navy serving and retired personnel. Nelson is shown facing south-southwest — toward Cape Trafalgar.