Part 17

Cape Trafalgar was sighted from off the deck, we are told, just as the battle was ending, and was made at about eight miles off. On either hand lay ships with shattered bulwarks and hulls gashed all over and riddled from the water-line upwards with gaping and splintered shot-holes, the yellow strakes between the ports seared and scorched by the back-blast from the guns and crusted over with half-burned powder. Some also had several of their ports knocked into one, or their port-lids unhung or wrenched away; others had their figure-heads clean gone, and their bowsprits smashed off short; others, in addition, had their stern and quarter galleries beaten in; and there were ugly smears and stains down the sides of all where the scuppers opened overboard. No fewer than nine ships were lying entirely dismantled--'ras comme des pontons,' as a Frenchman put it. In these everything on deck above the bulwarks was gone, shorn roughly off--rigging, spars, masts--everything. A short stump, only a few feet high, remained in one or two of the ships to show where a tall mast had that morning stood--that was all. All else had disappeared--smashed down, shot by the board and lying over the sides amid the tangled confusion of broken spars, torn rigging, and ragged sails. Eight of the dismasted ships were trophies of the battle, French or Spanish prizes--the _Bucentaure_ and the _Santisima Trinidad_ among them. The ninth was a British ship, the cruelly battered _Belleisle_, which had undergone a terrific mauling. The burning ship was the French _Achille_, which lay not far off--a mass of flames from end to end. She had been set on fire by accident in the last hour of the battle, and was now blazing fiercely from stem to stern, sending off heavy volumes of dense black smoke into the clear evening air, as the hapless vessel lay burning to the water's edge, or until the flames should reach the magazine. Over yonder a group of British ships, several with topmasts and yards gone, were closing on a big three-decker that had only her foremast left standing, Collingwood's _Royal Sovereign_. Nearer, the battered ships of Nelson's column formed another group, collecting round the _Victory_. Far to the north-west, towards Cadiz, could be seen the sails of eleven ships that were escaping with Gravina. Among these fugitives was the _Temeraire's_ first antagonist, the French _Neptune_, which, by carefully avoiding every attempt to bring her to close action, had got through the battle with a loss of only 13 men killed and 37 wounded. Black dots against the western sky, now ablaze in all the wild glory of a stormy October sunset, Dumanoir's flying ships could be seen--four in number--standing away into the Atlantic. The fifth ship of the group, the Spanish _Neptuno_, had been cut off and taken as the battle closed by the British _Minotaur_ and _Spartiate_.

All the while during the final scene Nelson's flag remained flying at the _Victory's_ mast-head--although the Admiral had for nearly an hour now been lying dead. Those on board were, perhaps, loth to lower it before they must. In accordance with one of the old fighting instructions of the navy, the commander-in-chief's ship in action kept her Admiral's flag flying in all circumstances until the battle was over, whatever might have happened to the Admiral meantime. Whether he was disabled or whether he was killed, the flag must still fly to the end of the action in its accustomed place. As a fact, at Trafalgar, Flag-Captain Hardy of the _Victory_ had had the entire handling of the British fleet from the moment that Nelson was struck down until the last shot had been fired. His descendants treasure to this day the silver pencil-case that Hardy 'used to write down signals during the battle of Trafalgar, _with the marks of his teeth on it made in moments of excitement_!' It was shown at the Naval Exhibition at Chelsea in 1891, one newspaper speaking of it as 'something like a relic!' Nelson's flag flew till sunset, and, in consequence, except the _Victory_ and the _Royal Sovereign_, to which Captain Hardy, of course, had sent the news specially, and Captain Blackwood's _Euryalus_, barely half a dozen ships of the fleet were aware of Nelson's death that night; or even that he had been wounded. In the _Temeraire_ herself the news was not known, owing to the dispersal of the fleet caused by the stormy weather of the three following days, until the 24th, when Captain Harvey first learnt what had happened by a casual signal from the _Defiance_.

This is what was said on the spot of the way the _Temeraire_ had done her work. 'I congratulate you most sincerely,' wrote Collingwood to Captain Harvey, on the 28th of October, 'on the noble and distinguished part the _Temeraire_ took in the battle; nothing could be finer; I have not words in which I can sufficiently express my admiration of it.'[113] This from a man so temperate in his language as Collingwood was at all times was indeed high praise.

Her day's work at Trafalgar cost the _Temeraire_ in casualties exactly 123 killed and wounded; or as Captain Harvey put it: 'Killed, 47; badly wounded, 31; slightly wounded, 45--in all, 123.' Captain Busigny and Lieutenant Kingston of the Marines, one midshipman (John Pitts) and Mr Oades, the carpenter, were the officers killed; one lieutenant of the Royal Navy, the surviving lieutenant of Marines, a master's-mate and a midshipman, with the _Temeraire's_ boatswain, were the officers wounded. Forty-three more of the _Temeraire's_ men were drowned on board the _Fougueux_ and the _Redoutable_, in the storm after the battle.

As everybody knows, all Nelson's Trafalgar prizes except four perished in the storm after the battle, or were set on fire or scuttled. Whose fault it was, or how it came about that Nelson's dying order to anchor immediately the battle was over, which would probably have preserved all the prizes, was set aside, we need not discuss. Both the _Temeraire's_ prizes were among the ships that were lost--the _Fougueux_ being wrecked a few miles south of Cadiz and the _Redoutable_ foundering in deep water. The _Redoutable_ foundered during the night of the 22nd, carrying down with her 13 of the _Temeraire's_ men. She was in tow of the _Swiftsure_, which had relieved the _Temeraire_ of her, when, about five on the previous afternoon, she made signals of distress. The straining of the dismasted hull as it pitched and rolled in the heavy seas had reopened the shot-holes below the water-line and the ship was filling. The _Swiftsure_ hove-to and lowered her boats, which in two trips brought off safely many of the prisoners and the wounded, and part of the _Temeraire's_ prize crew. Then, however, the attempt had to be given up. 'The weather was so bad and the sea so high,' that, in the words of the _Swiftsure's_ log, 'it was impossible for the boats to pass.' They were still, though, keeping the _Redoutable_ in tow, hoping she might live out the night, when, at half-past ten, all of a sudden, the prize foundered by the stern. The sinking was so sudden at the last that the _Swiftsure's_ men had no time to cast loose the tow-rope and had to chop it in two with axes. During the night a few of the _Redoutable's_ men were picked up floating on rafts that they had made, but upwards of 190 hapless fellows went down in the ship.

The _Temeraire_ herself had a bad time of it in the storm. All Tuesday, the 22nd, the _Sirius_ kept her in tow, but it was so rough that little could be done on board towards refitting the ship or attempting to rig jury-masts or repair damages. On the 23rd the _Sirius_ was called off by signal to recover prizes adrift which the sortie that the refugee ships in Cadiz attempted that day was threatening. The _Africa_ was told off to take the _Temeraire_ in tow, but the storm came on worse than ever during the afternoon, and the _Africa_, whose badly damaged masts were threatening to roll over the side every minute, could do nothing but stand by. 'The state of the _Temeraire_ is so bad,' wrote Captain Harvey, that night, 'that we have been in constant apprehension of our lives, every sail and yard having been destroyed, and nothing but the lower masts left standing, the rudder-head almost shot off and is since gone, and lower masts all shot through and through in many places.'

The _Temeraire_, however, managed to come through all safely, and she again held her own by herself throughout the 24th and all the next day. Unaided, she brought up in the end in safety off San Lucar, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir some 25 miles north of Cadiz, at seven on the morning of the 25th. Here the men stopped shot-holes above water, cleared away wreckage and completed the knotting and splicing of the damaged rigging and cleaning up of the ship, and got up jury-masts and lower yards:--five days' hard work. On the 30th of October, the _Defiance_ took the _Temeraire_ in tow for Gibraltar, where the ship let go anchor on the afternoon of the 2nd of November, twelve days after Trafalgar.

At Gibraltar the _Temeraire_ was patched up and refitted sufficiently to enable her to proceed to England under sail. The _Victory_ had arrived four days before, and was lying at anchor with Nelson's flag and her ensign at half-mast, as were the other ships of the fleet, upwards of a dozen, that had as yet come in. Four days afterwards the _Euryalus_, from which Admiral Collingwood had removed into the _Queen_, sailed for England, carrying on board Collingwood's completed Trafalgar despatch,[114] the captured French and Spanish ensigns (to be hung up in St. Paul's and left there to perish through neglect), and Admiral Villeneuve himself, going to meet his doom. Within six months the hapless French Admiral was dead--by his own hand. The story, so long believed in England, that Admiral Villeneuve's death was another foul murder to be charged against Napoleon has every probability against it. Paroled on his arrival at Spithead, and exchanged on the usual terms, Villeneuve had landed at Morlaix in Brittany, and was on his way to report himself in Paris, when one evening a sealed letter from the Minister of Marine was handed to him. Next morning he was found in his bedroom at the inn where he had put up, stabbed to the heart. A letter taking leave of his wife was found in the room. He was buried that night without any honours.

Poor Villeneuve! It was a pitiful and hapless closing to a career that had opened with such bright promise for a certain young _garde de la Marine_ on the quarter-deck of De Suffren's _Heros_[115]; a sad, unworthy ending for one in whose veins ran the blood of eight-and-twenty knights of St. Louis, St. Esprit, and St. Michel; for one who in his own right was of the highest of the old _noblesse_ of Royal France, for a member of a House that had given one of the most famous of Grand Masters to the Order, and a Saint and ten Bishops to the Church.[116] Poor Villeneuve!--where moulders his unhappy dust? The summer visitor from England, at the price of a cheap ticket, may see where the poor remains of the vanquished of Trafalgar rest to-day--if, that is, he can find the place. Beneath no storied monument is it, among his country's greater dead; not in the vault of the Villeneuves where his high-born kinsmen sleep:--not there. In a forgotten spot in the old burial-ground at distant Rennes, a Provencal he among stranger Bretons, the most luckless of his line lies there in a suicide's desolate grave. And it is all the more pitiful too, when one thinks of our own Trafalgar chiefs laid to their rest together in honour in St. Paul's. Side by side in the vaulted crypt beneath the Cathedral dome rest our three Trafalgar admirals in honour evermore. Brothers-in-arms in life, like brothers in death they lie; till, pealing out on land and sea, the dread Archangel's trump shall sound their final call to quarters. Poor Villeneuve! What a contrast!

The _Temeraire_ followed the _Euryalus_ to England some days later. She brought on board, like the other returning ships, three hundred French prisoners, together with, as her special passenger. Captain Infernet of the French _Intrepide_. She arrived at Spithead on the 5th of December, the day after the _Victory_, with Nelson's remains on board, had anchored at St. Helens, and on the 20th of December went up Portsmouth Harbour to go into dock. It so chanced that an artist, John Christian Schetky, afterwards marine painter to King George the Fourth, William the Fourth, and Queen Victoria, was at Portsmouth on the day the _Temeraire_ came in, cheered to the echo on all sides by crowds on the Platform and Point batteries and by every boat and ship that she passed. Sketchbook in hand Mr. Schetky made good use of his opportunity.

Captain Harvey arrived in England to find himself a Rear-Admiral, one of the officers specially promoted in honour of Trafalgar, included in the promotion caused by the creation of the rank of Admiral of the Red. He handed over the _Temeraire_ to Acting-Captain Larmour who, six weeks later, paid the ship off for a refit and repair in Portsmouth dockyard which lasted several months. Admiral Harvey was one of the pall-bearers at Nelson's funeral. When in January 1815 he became a K.C.B. he was granted as a special motto above his crest, the name _Temeraire_, together with as supporters to the Harvey family arms,--a triton with a laurel-wreathed trident, and a sea-horse with a naval crown inscribed 'Trafalgar,' bearing underneath all as an additional motto the legend _Redoutable et Fougueux_.

How for six years after Trafalgar the _Temeraire_ did her duty before the enemy, at one time helping to keep Marshal Soult out of Cadiz, at another taking her part in holding in check the powerful new fleet that Napoleon created in Toulon to avenge Trafalgar on some future day that never came--all that is another story. Her last shotted guns were fired to silence a French battery in Hyeres Bay, near the entrance to Toulon harbour, which rashly opened fire on the _Temeraire_ one day. The _Temeraire_ closed with the battery and gave the French gunners one tremendous broadside that practically cleared the battery out. Not a shot came from it again. The war story of the _Temeraire_ ends six months later with her final paying off at Plymouth.

There only remained for the _Temeraire_, after that, to complete her allotted span and await the striking of the inevitable hour.

For age will rust the brightest blade, And time will break the stoutest bow; Was never wight so starkly made, But age and time will bring him low.

She outlasted, indeed, her old captain at Trafalgar. In 1836, six years after Sir Eliab Harvey had been gathered to his fathers, his old ship entered on her last turn of duty, harbour service at Sheerness as Guardship of Ordinary, Captain-Superintendent's ship for the Fleet Reserve in the Medway. By an interesting coincidence, the officer who last of all hoisted his pennant on board the 'Fighting' _Temeraire_ was the man who had been her first lieutenant at Trafalgar, now a grey-headed old post-captain, holding his last appointment before retiring from the Service as Captain-Superintendent of Sheerness dockyard, Captain Thomas Fortescue Kennedy. Actually the last guns that were ever fired on board the 'Fighting' _Temeraire_ were for the Royal Salute in honour of Queen Victoria's Coronation Day. Six weeks after that, on the 16th of August 1838, the _Temeraire_ was put up for auction and sold for L5530 to Mr. Beatson, the Rotherhithe shipbreaker. She was sold out of the Navy 'all standing,' with her masts and yards still in her, just as her guard-ship crew left the vessel, as Turner saw her and has faithfully painted her: a fact, also, that explains what has puzzled many critics of the famous picture, the removal to be broken up of a man-of-war rigged and masted and with yards across.

So we come, at length, to the _Temeraire's_ final hour and her appointed end.

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, Where knelt the vanquished foe, When winds were hurrying o'er the flood And waves were white below; No more shall feel the victor's tread, Nor know the conquered knee-- The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea.

All the way up the river on her last day, we are told, the _Temeraire_ was cheered as she passed along by the crews of the merchant ships and the people on board the river steamboats 'surprised as well as delighted by the novel spectacle of a 98-gun ship in the Pool,'[117] while after they had begun to break the _Temeraire_ up at Rotherhithe numbers of people came to visit 'the ship that helped to avenge Nelson at Trafalgar,' attracted by reports of the finding of Trafalgar relics on board. One of these was a round-shot, found deeply embedded in the centre of one of the _Temeraire's_ main-deck beams with a French sailor's red cap, which had evidently been used as an improvised wad in the hurry of the fighting, stuck fast to it. Another was the brass memorial tablet (already spoken of), let into the quarter-deck near the wheel, and bearing the inscription, 'England expects that every man will do his duty.'[118]

Two gigantic figures, quarter-gallery decorations, taken from the _Temeraire_ during her breaking up, are still in existence, preserved by the successors to the firm at whose hands the old ship met her fate.[119] Any one, also, who cares to make a pilgrimage among the byways of riverside London on the south side, may come across a church within a stone's-throw of where the final scene in the _Temeraire's_ career was enacted--St. Paul's, Globe Street, Rotherhithe--in which the altar, altar rails, and sanctuary chairs are all made of heart-of-oak carved from the frame timbers of the 'Fighting' _Temeraire_.

So the story reaches its close. It can hardly end better than with the eloquent passage in which Mr. Ruskin has delivered what is, in intent, the funeral oration at the passing of the 'Fighting' _Temeraire_.[120]

'This particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial with chief victory, prevailing over the fatal vessel that had given Nelson death--surely, if anything without a soul deserved honour or affection, we owed them here. Those sails that strained so full bent into the battle, that broad bow that struck the surf aside, enlarging silently in steadfast haste, full front to the shot, resistless and without reply, those triple ports whose choirs of flame rang forth in their courses into the fierce revenging monotone, which, when it died away, left no answering voice to rise any more upon the sea against the strength of England--those sides that were wet with the long runlets of English life-blood, like press planks at vintage, gleaming goodly crimson down to the cast and clash of the washing foam--those pale masts that stayed themselves up against the war-ruin, shaking out their ensigns through the thunder, till sail and ensign drooped--steeped in the death-stilled pause of Andalusian air, burning with its witness-clouds of human souls at rest--surely for these some sacred care might have been left in our thoughts, some quiet space amidst the lapse of English waters? Nay, not so, we have stern keepers to trust her glory to--the fire and the worm. Never more shall sunset lay golden robe on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding. Perhaps, where the low gate opens to some cottage garden, the tired traveller may ask idly why the moss grows so green on its rugged wood, and even the sailor's child may not answer, nor know, that the night dew lies deep in the war-rents of the wood of the old _Temeraire_.'

There's a far bell ringing At the setting of the sun And a phantom voice is singing Of the great days done. There's a far bell ringing, And a phantom voice is singing Of renown for ever clinging To the great days done.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 79: Ruskin, _Notes on the Turner Collection_, p. 80.]

[Footnote 80: Thornbury's _Life of Turner_, vol. i. pp. 335-336.]

[Footnote 81: 'She was towed up the river by two steam tugs; every vessel that she passed appeared like a pigmy.'--_Gentleman's Magazine_, 'Domestic Occurrences,' September 16, 1838.]

[Footnote 82: Ruskin, _Notes on the Turner Collection_, p. 81.]

[Footnote 83: The _Temeraire_, of course, was fading _up_ the river, but the exigences of euphony no doubt required the inversion.]

[Footnote 84: The _Temeraire_, from which the Trafalgar _Temeraire_ took her name, was a French 74, captured by Admiral Boscawen in his battle with De la Clue off Lagos in August 1759. She served in the British navy for some years, and after being utilised as a floating battery at Plymouth during the American War, was finally sold out of the service in 1783.]

[Footnote 85: '"Thirty-six hours' calm, and England is ours," so says one of the French papers in announcing that the invasion of England is to be attempted before the 14th July. A division of the Imperial Guard has already arrived at Havre on its way to Boulogne, where the Emperor will arrive within a week.'--The _Observer_, June 24, 1804.

'By an American gentleman just arrived from the Continent, we have received positive and authentic information that the Boulogne flotilla is in a complete state of equipment and ready to embrace the first opportunity of putting to sea. Whether that opportunity will ever be permitted to the enemy by our blockading squadrons remains to be seen. The troops stationed on the uplands above Boulogne, and in its vicinity, amount to upwards of 160,000 men.'--The _Times_, August 14, 1804.]

[Footnote 86: Captain Mahan, _The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire_, vol. ii. p. 118.]

[Footnote 87: _Memoirs and Correspondence of Lord Collingwood_, by G.L. Newnham Collingwood, p. 93.]

[Footnote 88: Says the _Observer_ for the 18th of December: 'The motto of Admiral Cornwallis seems to be that from Dryden: "Endure and Conquer." We could dwell upon this theme for ever. Others have simply taught the British Navy (apt scholars enough) to triumph. He has first instructed them in manly perseverance and endurance so opposite to the impetuosity of their natures. We could name the periods, and these too frequently occurring, when a damaged yard or topmast was a sufficient excuse for a good fortnight in port, and this with officers of acknowledged gallantry. What a contrast have we now! The hardy veteran deserves an Order of Merit to be invented on purpose for him.' Without detracting from the admiral's merits this is a little hard on some of Cornwallis's predecessors--on Hawke, for instance, who in the Seven Years' War blockaded Brest throughout 'one of the worst winters on record.' Says Horace Walpole, writing on the 14th of January 1760: 'What milksops the Marlboroughs and Turennes, the Blakes and the Van Tromps appear now, who whipped into winter quarters the moment their noses looked blue. There is Hawke in the Bay weathering _this_ winter, after conquering in a storm.']

[Footnote 89: The capture of Admiral Villeneuve's frigate the _Didon_, sent out on a mission of the highest importance, by the British frigate _Phoenix_, prevented Villeneuve's junction with another French fleet cruising in the Bay of Biscay. Hearing nothing of his colleague, Villeneuve, after leaving Ferrol, became nervous and turned south, instead of pushing on across the Bay for Brest as Napoleon expected him to do.]