Part 14

Then she was 'the _Victory's_ companion in her closing strife,' as Mr. Ruskin has called the _Temeraire_, 'prevailing over the fatal vessel that had given Nelson death.'[79] That is one of the reasons why people remember the _Temeraire_. There is another--that all the world knows. To learn it one has only to visit the National Gallery. Turner's masterpiece has made the _Temeraire's_ name a household word all the world over. But, all the same, had Turner never painted his picture at all, even without the aid of Turner's magic brush, the _Temeraire_ must surely, for the part she took in the greatest sea-fight of history, have achieved for her name an immortal renown.

How Turner came to paint his 'Fighting _Temeraire_' is a story in itself. The famous picture came into being by the merest accident; as the outcome of a happy chance, as the result of a casual meeting with the old ship at a water-picnic on the Thames one autumn evening of the year 1838.[80] Turner, with Clarkson Stanfield and some friends, was boating off Greenwich marshes in Blackwall Reach when the old ship passed them, coming up the river from Sheerness to meet her destined end off Rotherhithe, where the shipbreaker Beatson's men were waiting for her. She had been sold out of the service some days before for L5530, barely the market value of the copper bolts that held her timbers together--just a twelfth of the prime cost of the ship's hull in labour and materials, or one-twentieth of the total value of the ship, gunned and equipped for sea. Forlorn enough, and a thing for pity, looked the grand old man-of-war as the Sheerness men had left her, her sails stripped from the yards, her tiers of ports without guns and closed down, her hull with its last coat of dockyard drab all rusty-looking and weather-stained, cast off and discarded, as it were a broken warrior being borne to a pauper's grave.

Two tugs had the ship in tow, as contemporary accounts of the _Temeraire's_ arrival in the river relate, not one, as Turner has painted the memorable scene.[81] In Turner's picture the _Temeraire_ is shown passing the water-party before she rounded the Isle of Dogs, when heading south-south-east up Blackwall Reach, with the September sun setting astern of the ship to the north-west. 'There's a fine picture, Turner,' said Stanfield, pointing to the war-worn veteran of the sea as she stemmed her way past them, and Turner went home full of the idea to reproduce the scene on canvas, with touches of his own, to give the world a picture 'of all pictures of subjects not involving human pain,' says Mr. Ruskin, 'the most pathetic that ever was painted.'[82]

Now the sunset breezes shiver, _Temeraire! Temeraire!_ And she's fading down the river, _Temeraire! Temeraire!_ Now the sunset breezes shiver, And she's fading down the river, But in England's song for ever She's the _Fighting Temeraire_.[83]

The Fighting _Temeraire_ tugged to her last berth to be broken up,' was the title Turner gave his picture when he sent it in to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1839. He added these lines, composed apparently by himself--

'The flag that braved the battle and the breeze No longer owns her.'

The 'Fighting' _Temeraire_ was an Essex ship, built--nine-tenths of her--of oak cut in Hainault forest and sent across to Chatham dockyard, where the _Temeraire's_ keel was laid in July 1793.[84] Tuesday, the 11th of September 1798, was the day of her launch, 'a squally day with drenching rain.' She was a three-decker, a second-rate, 'a ninety-eight,' in the Navy parlance of the time, a ship carrying ninety-eight guns (32-pounders, 18's, and long 12's, with twelve carronades as well), throwing a broadside weight of metal at each discharge of 1336 lbs., very nearly twelve cwts.--three-fifths of a ton of solid cast iron. 'She is one of the finest ships that we have seen,' wrote an officer who inspected the _Temeraire_ on the stocks a little while before she was launched.

An Essex man captained the _Temeraire_ at Trafalgar, Eliab Harvey, of Rolls Park, Chigwell, Essex. He was a great-grandson of Eliab Harvey, brother of Dr. William Harvey the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, by whose side he now lies buried in the family vault under the Harvey Chapel in Hempstead Church, near Saffron Walden. All Essex, we are told, was represented at the funeral, or followed the coffin to its last resting-place. Captain Harvey, during the time that he commanded the _Temeraire_, had also a seat in Parliament for the county of Essex, in accordance with a political usage of those days which enabled officers on active service to represent constituencies at Westminster, although Ministers apparently did not always find it satisfactory. 'I don't like your M.P. Navy Captains,' said Castlereagh once; 'they are always off Cape Finisterre when they are wanted, and when they are sent for they say they don't like being "whistled up merely to give a vote."' Those who know their Marryat will remember the case of the Hon. Captain Delmar, M.P., of H.M.S. _Paragon_, a frigate in the Channel Squadron, 'which was never sea-going except in the Recess.' It was better though than this with the _Temeraire_, which Captain Harvey commissioned for the 'Western Squadron,' as in those days the Channel Fleet was generally called, at Plymouth, in November 1803, six months after the outbreak of the Great War with Napoleon.

Strange as it may seem to us, the _Temeraire's_ name at that moment had for most people an unpleasant ring about it. The shadow of a terrible tragedy rested just then over the name _Temeraire_. The public had not yet got over the shock with which, barely two years before, the whole country had learnt that the crew of one of the flagships of the Channel Fleet, while lying in Bantry Bay, had mutinied, and offered violence to their Admiral and officers, using ugly threats and proposing to point guns loaded with grape-shot to sweep the quarter-deck. Nor had people forgotten the grim sequel, the relentless severity of the retribution that fell on the ringleaders; how eleven of the _Temeraire's_ men had been hanged at the yard-arm, two flogged through the fleet at Spithead, receiving two hundred lashes each, seven sent to the hulks for life. The newspapers had been full of the terrible story, as related day by day in the evidence at the two courts-martial that sat at Portsmouth to try the mutineers. The trial lasted five days, and the report of it in the _Times_ of the 13th of January 1802 took up the whole paper, all but two columns. Nor had the following paragraph which appeared in the _Naval Chronicle_, done any good to the _Temeraire's_ reputation:--'Plymouth, October 7th, 1802; The seamen of the _Temeraire_ of 98-guns, Rear-Admiral Campbell, paid off, put on crape hat-bands round their straw hats in memory of the mutineers in that ship who were executed for the mutiny in Bantry Bay last year.' That unhappy episode in the ship's story was, however, as far as the _Temeraire_ herself was concerned, now past and done with. Now the _Temeraire_ had a new ship's company throughout; captain, officers, and men, with a future of their own before them.

Captain Harvey manned his ship to a large extent with Liverpool men, sent round from the Mersey by tender, and sailed from Cawsand Bay on the 11th of March 1804, to join Admiral Cornwallis off Brest.

It was perhaps the most critical period in our national history. On the heights above Boulogne lay Napoleon's Grand Army, 160,000 men, waiting for the French fleet to put to sea and secure its passage across the Straits of Dover.[85] The fate of England depended on the British Navy. There were twenty-one French line-of-battle ships in Brest, six others at Rochefort, and five sheltering in the Spanish port of Ferrol. At Brest, also, there were known to be upwards of 20,000 French soldiers; and another 20,000 under Augereau were under canvas at Rochefort, 'supposed against Ireland,' according to Admiral Cornwallis's instructions from the Admiralty. It was the business of the Channel Fleet to hold the enemy in check at all points from Ushant Island, off Brest, to Cape Finisterre, and prevent aid from elsewhere arriving to enable them to put to sea. At the same time, as his appointed part in the great strategic plan of campaign, Nelson off Toulon kept his tireless watch over the French Mediterranean Fleet. Thus the toils were set, the gambit was opened.

'They were dull, weary, eventless months,' says Captain Mahan in one of his most telling passages,[86] 'those months of watching and waiting of the big ships before the French arsenals. Purposeless they surely seemed to many, but they saved England. The world has never seen a more impressive demonstration of the influence of sea-power upon its history. Those far-distant storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.'

It was Napoleon with all the resources of his Empire in its full vigour at his back, Napoleon at the zenith of his intellect and genius for war, Napoleon in the year before Austerlitz--baffled and held at arm's length by the British Navy. One has only to glance at the daily newspapers of 1804 to realise the superb self-confidence with which Great Britain braced herself to meet the threatening peril. The nation knew its strength and on what, under Providence, it relied; the nation knew it and the Navy knew it--as we too, after forgetting it for a time, have in these later years at length come again to recognise the vital root-fact of Great Britain's existence--

No track of men, no footsteps to and fro Lead to her gates. The path lies o'er the sea Invincible.

Six months of pitching and rolling in the dreary Bay of Biscay was the _Temeraire's_ lot at the outset, as one of Vice-Admiral Calder's squadron watching Rochefort. The most disliked of all billets perhaps was blockade duty off the Basque Roads, ever facing the dreary sand dunes of Aix and Oleron, stretching wearily along the featureless coast, there and back, between Sables d'Olonne and the mouth of the Gironde, buffeted week in week out by persistent gales and rough weather. All there was to do, practically, was now and again to stop some wretched neutral passing by--usually a Portuguese trading brig, or a Prussian galliot, for or from Bordeaux--and examine her papers; but for days together sometimes--

The Wind at the West or thereabout, Nothing gone in and nothing come out,

was all that went down in their logs, according to the refrain on the dull routine of their daily life of a gun-room ditty composed on board one of the ships blockading Rochefort. Every two or three months, as her turn came round, one or other of the ships would part company for a week or ten days and proceed to Cawsand Bay--communicating on the way with the fleet off Brest to take letters for England--to fill up her water-casks and take in fresh stores and provisions, overhaul spars and rigging, and then return bringing bullocks and bread and vegetables for the squadron. That was their only relaxation. In her turn, towards the end of May, the _Temeraire_ went in to Cawsand Bay, as the 'Plymouth Report' of the Naval Chronicle records.

_May 26._--Came in from the Channel Fleet, which she left all well, last Wednesday, the _Temeraire_ of 98 guns. The enemy as usual. Our frigates frequently go in to reconnoitre within a mile and a half of the outer-most ships, and within range of their shots and shells of which the enemy give them plenty but without damage.

In August, when Collingwood had relieved Calder, a closer watch on the enemy than before was maintained, owing to the prevalence of rumours that the French were on the point of putting to sea. Collingwood, we are told, frequently passed the night on the quarter-deck of his flagship, at intervals lying down on a gun-carriage to snatch a short sleep, 'from which Admiral Collingwood would rise from time to time to sweep the horizon with his night glass lest the enemy should escape in the dark.'[87] The French, though, remained quiet all the time. One or two of their ships would come out now and then and exercise at sail drill in Basque Roads, and they had a small sham fight once, but no attempt was made to run or force the blockade.

September saw the _Temeraire_ transferred from the Rochefort squadron to 'the Team' off Brest, as the big ship division of Cornwallis's main fleet was familiarly called in the Navy. There was more to do and see off Brest, perhaps, but the life there was no less hard and toilsome. The three-deckers cruised by themselves outside Ushant, patrolling night and day; keeping far out to seaward when the wind was from the west, and, as the standing order ran, 'well up with Ushant in an easterly wind.' Off Black Rocks, between Ushant and the mainland, cruised four or six two-deckers, the 'Inshore Squadron'; while close in, off the mouth of Brest Harbour itself, just out of gunshot of the shore batteries, watching every move in the French fleet as it lay at anchor in the roadstead, were frigates and cutters on the look-out. Every day they expected the enemy to leave port, but, as it had been off Rochefort, in vain.

Then the winter storms set in, hard gales continuously and squally weather. Twice during October severe storms from the south-west compelled Cornwallis to stand off the coast and bear up for Torbay: to lie there with the 'Blue Peter' at the fore, and not a soul allowed on shore, until at the first sign of the wind shifting anchors were weighed for Brest again. In November a rough north-easter drove part of the fleet off the station many leagues out into the Atlantic. The rest found shelter on the enemy's own coast, in Douarnenez Bay, less than twenty miles from Brest, and rode the storm out there. 'It is with great satisfaction,' says the _Times_ of the 16th of November 1804, 'we understand that our fleet off Brest, has withstood the violent gales which have of late prevailed, and continues to maintain that vigilant position, which, we trust, will effectually obstruct the designs of the enemy.'[88] December and the January of the New Year (1805) brought worse weather still, a succession of fierce gales--'it blows harder than ever we remember,' wrote the _Naval Chronicle's_ Portsmouth correspondent in January--that crippled half the fleet and forced Cornwallis to spend all February and half March repairing damages in Torbay. Seven of the big ships, leaking seriously, with hulls strained, gear swept overboard, masts sprung, spars carried away, had to go into dock at Plymouth, among them the _Temeraire_, whose repairs took two months to make good.

She rejoined the flag off Brest in April, just as the startling news came to hand that the French Toulon Fleet had appeared off Cadiz, joined hands with the Spanish Fleet there and gone off westward. Their destination was unknown and there was no news of Lord Nelson. All that month of May the _Temeraire_ and her consorts off Brest held themselves ready to clear for action at the shortest notice, daily expecting the sails of Admiral Villeneuve's fleet to appear on the horizon to the south-west. As if awaiting Villeneuve's arrival, also, the whole of the Brest fleet had come out of harbour and was riding at single anchor, twenty-one sail of the line completely equipped for sea, under the cliff batteries of Bertheaume Bay. The British fleet off Brest for the moment could only muster seventeen sail. In England, meanwhile, the newspapers were full of accounts of how the Grand Army at Boulogne, now vauntingly styled _l'Armee d'Angleterre_, was duly holding embarkation and landing parades and drills on the sea-shore under the eyes of Soult and Ney. At the end of the month intelligence arrived that Villeneuve was in the West Indies, and that Nelson had gone in pursuit of him. June passed in waiting for information of Villeneuve's return to Europe, the Channel Fleet being continuously reinforced from England, which enabled Collingwood and a 'Special Service' squadron to be detached to keep guard off Cadiz and the Straits of Gibraltar. On the 11th of July came the news that Villeneuve had been sighted in Mid-Atlantic, homeward bound; after which, a fortnight later, came the further news that Admiral Calder had had an indecisive battle with the enemy off Cape Finisterre, and that Villeneuve had put into Ferrol. Calder himself rejoined Cornwallis a few days afterwards, and then Nelson came in with his fleet.

Cornwallis, from the ships now at his disposal, immediately made up a new fleet of eighteen sail of the line to blockade Villeneuve in Ferrol. It was placed under Calder's orders and sent off on the 16th of August. The _Temeraire_ sailed with Calder, and so the story of her service with the 'Western Squadron' ends.

Before they arrived off Ferrol they heard from a frigate that Villeneuve had left the port. He had put to sea as though intending to cross the Bay of Biscay direct to Brest, but when two days out, had suddenly, for some unfathomable reason of his own, gone about and stood southward. Whither he was bound could only be guessed, but Calder's orders were to follow the French wherever they might go, and he made for the Straits of Gibraltar under all sail.

Did he pass over a certain spot, some ninety miles north-west of Cape Finisterre, where a mass of frigate wreckage and splinters and jagged chips was floating about--like the ring of fluttered feathers that one sometimes sees at the corner of a wood on an autumn afternoon telling how a sparrow-hawk has passed that way? That flotsam off Finisterre, could it have spoken, would have told a tale; the story of the incident on which the campaign of Trafalgar hinged:--_why_ Admiral Villeneuve had gone south instead of north.[89]

Off Cadiz Calder found Collingwood with half a dozen ships, and learned that the French were refitting in that port. Collingwood had had the narrowest of narrow escapes of being cut off and overpowered by the enemy's sudden appearance off Cadiz,[90] but he had cleverly got out of their way in the nick of time, and was now 'observing' them, making believe by sham signals every day that he was in touch with a large British fleet in the offing. Collingwood as the senior officer took Calder under his orders, and the united forces continued to watch Cadiz until at the end of September Lord Nelson himself arrived from England to take the supreme command.

For three weeks, as we all know, Nelson kept watch and ward over the enemy in Cadiz, until on the morning of Saturday the 19th of October his look-out frigates off the mouth of Cadiz harbour at last made the longed-for signal that the combined fleet was coming out of port.

They began to come out between seven and eight o'clock on Saturday morning, and from that time until the two fleets were in presence of each other off Cape Trafalgar on Monday morning, every move the enemy made was signalled to Nelson, lying out of sight from Cadiz, off Cape St Mary, by flag signals passed along a chain of ships in the day-time, and with rockets and blue lights and the firing of guns at night. 'For two days,' writes Midshipman Hercules Robinson of the frigate _Euryalus_, Captain Blackwood's ship, in charge of the look-out squadron, 'there was not a movement that we did not communicate, till I thought that Blackwood, who gave the orders, and Bruce our signal mid, and Soper our signal man who executed them, must have died of it; and when we had brought the two fleets fairly together we took our place between the two lines of lights, as a cab might in Regent Street, the watch was called and Blackwood turned in quietly to wait for the morning.'[91] So close to the enemy did the _Euryalus_ keep all Sunday night that, in the words of one of the men on board (a marine named Pearce) in a letter home, 'their lights looked like a street well lighted up.'

Monday was Trafalgar Day. The enemy when first sighted from the British Fleet at daybreak were about eleven or twelve miles off, 'a forest of masts to leeward,' as one officer described them, standing along the coast towards the Straits of Gibraltar. Nelson at once headed eastward, straight for them:--'ere it was well light the signals were flying through the fleet to bear up and form the order of sailing in two columns.' Then, immediately after that, up went the flags 'Prepare for battle,' Signal No. 13, and in response throughout the fleet, the drums on board every ship at once struck up the stirring old war-beat of the Navy, 'Hearts of Oak'--

Come cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer, To add something more to this wonderful year.

By seven o'clock every ship in the fleet had been cleared for action and all were ready for the enemy. A quarter of an hour was sufficient to clear for action on board a smart ship in 'Eighteen hundred and War time,' as our grandfathers called the days when the 'Fighting' _Temeraire_ was at sea.

So admirably had Nelson organised his fleet and arranged things beforehand that three signals were all that he needed to make to set the day's work in train. At twenty minutes to seven the _Victory_ signalled--'Form the order of sailing in two columns.' Then, a moment later, up went 'No. 13,'--the fighting flags--two flags, the upper one comprising three horizontal bands, yellow, red, yellow; the lower, three vertical bands, blue, white, blue--'Prepare for battle.' Ten minutes later another signal went up--'Bear up and sail large on the course steered by the Admiral.' The whole fleet on that headed directly for the enemy under all sail. These three signals were all that were necessary for the tactics of the battle, and all that Nelson made. What other signals were made from the _Victory_ during the day, until after the fight had been won, dealt with subsidiary points and were merely incidental.

Here is the opening entry for the day in the _Temeraire's_ log. 'At daylight saw the enemy's fleet in the S.E. Cleared ship for action and made all sail. Light airs. Standing for the enemy.'

At eight o'clock all hands throughout the fleet were piped to breakfast. 'The officers,' we are told by one of them, 'now met at breakfast, and though each seemed to exult in the hope of a glorious termination to the contest so near at hand, a fearful presage was experienced that all would not again unite at that festive board.' More than one seemed 'particularly impressed with a persuasion that he would not survive the day.... The sound of the drum, however, soon put an end to our meditations; and, after a hasty, and, alas, a final farewell to some, we repaired to our respective posts.'[92]

All on board now went to quarters, to their stations for the battle; the cooks' fires were put out, and the magazines opened and powder sent up to the guns.