Battle of Trafalgar (1805): Nelson's Victory and Death at Sea

The Battle of Trafalgar, fought on 21 October 1805 off Cape Trafalgar in south-west Spain, was the most decisive naval battle of the Napoleonic Wars. A British fleet under Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed or captured 22 ships of a larger combined French and Spanish fleet without losing a ship of its own. Nelson was killed at the moment of victory, and the battle secured British command of the sea for more than a century.

Background: Napoleon’s invasion plan

War between Britain and France resumed in May 1803. Napoleon assembled a large army and a flotilla of invasion craft around Boulogne on the Channel coast, but he could only cross if his navy controlled the Channel for a few days. In 1804 Spain also entered the war on the French side, adding its fleet to his.

His plan in 1805 was for French squadrons to escape the British blockade, unite in the West Indies to draw the Royal Navy away, and then return to dominate the Channel. Vice-Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve sailed from Toulon in March 1805, picked up Spanish ships at Cadiz and crossed to the Caribbean. Nelson chased him across the Atlantic and back.

On his return Villeneuve fought an indecisive action against Admiral Sir Robert Calder off Cape Finisterre on 22 July 1805, then took refuge first in northern Spain and finally in Cadiz. In late August Napoleon gave up the invasion and marched his army east against Austria, where it would win the Battle of Austerlitz in December. Villeneuve was ordered to take the combined fleet into the Mediterranean to support operations in southern Italy.

The opposing fleets

Nelson took command of the fleet off Cadiz in late September 1805. Learning that he was about to be replaced by Vice-Admiral Francois Rosily, Villeneuve sailed from Cadiz on 19 and 20 October.

Casualty figures for the allied fleet are estimates and vary between historians.

Nelson’s plan

The usual tactic of the time was for fleets to fight in two parallel lines, exchanging broadsides, which rarely produced a decisive result. Nelson explained a different idea to his captains, later known as the “Nelson touch”. The British would attack in two columns that cut through the enemy line at right angles, breaking it into sections. The rear and centre of the allied fleet would be overwhelmed before its van could turn round to help.

The approach was dangerous. Ships sailing straight towards the enemy line could not fire their broadsides and would take raking fire for perhaps half an hour or more. Nelson relied on the superior gunnery, seamanship and morale of British crews to make up for it.

The battle

On the morning of 21 October the fleets sighted each other in light winds and a heavy swell. Villeneuve ordered his fleet to reverse course towards Cadiz, which left his line ragged and curved. The British formed two columns: the northern, or weather, column led by Nelson in HMS Victory, and the southern, or lee, column led by Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood in HMS Royal Sovereign.

At around 11.45 a.m. Nelson ordered the famous signal: “England expects that every man will do his duty.” It was sent by his signal officer, Lieutenant John Pasco, using Home Popham’s numerical code. Nelson’s last signal was “Engage the enemy more closely”.

The Royal Sovereign broke into the allied line at about noon, fighting the Spanish flagship Santa Ana. Victory followed further north, passing astern of Villeneuve’s flagship Bucentaure and raking her with a devastating broadside before becoming locked alongside the French Redoutable. The battle then dissolved into a series of close-range fights between individual ships, which the British crews, firing faster, generally won.

At about 1.15 p.m. a marksman in the rigging of the Redoutable shot Nelson as he walked the quarterdeck with Captain Thomas Hardy. The musket ball passed through his shoulder and lung and lodged in his spine. He was carried below, where he lived for about three hours. He was told of the scale of the victory before he died at around 4.30 p.m.

Villeneuve surrendered aboard the Bucentaure. The allied van under Rear-Admiral Pierre Dumanoir turned back too late to change the result, and four of his ships escaped. Admiral Federico Gravina led the surviving ships, many badly damaged, back to Cadiz; he was gravely wounded and died the following March. The French ship Achille caught fire and blew up late in the afternoon.

Some of the hardest fighting took place around Victory. HMS Temeraire, a 98-gun ship of the line, came up on the other side of the Redoutable and helped force her surrender, while also fighting the French Fougueux. Further south, Collingwood’s leading ships such as Belleisle were dismasted and nearly overwhelmed before the rest of the column arrived. The huge Spanish four-decker Santisima Trinidad, then the largest warship afloat with around 130 or more guns, was battered into surrender and later sank in the storm that followed the battle.

The storm and aftermath

A severe gale struck the next day and lasted for nearly a week. Many of the captured ships, battered and under-manned, were wrecked, scuttled or retaken by their crews. Of the prizes, only four were brought into Gibraltar. Thousands of sailors on both sides died in the storm or in the wrecks. Collingwood, now in command, was criticised by some for not anchoring the fleet as Nelson had wished, though he made the decision in very difficult conditions.

Dumanoir’s four escaping ships were captured on 4 November by a squadron under Sir Richard Strachan at the Battle of Cape Ortegal. The schooner HMS Pickle carried Collingwood’s dispatch to Falmouth, and the news reached London on 6 November, provoking both celebration and mourning.

Villeneuve was taken to England as a prisoner, released in 1806 and found dead from stab wounds in an inn at Rennes in April 1806. His death was officially ruled a suicide.

Key people

• Horatio Nelson (1758–1805), Britain’s most famous admiral, already celebrated for the Nile (1798) and Copenhagen (1801).
• Cuthbert Collingwood, Nelson’s second-in-command and friend, who led the lee column and took command after Nelson’s death.
• Thomas Hardy, captain of HMS Victory, who was with Nelson when he was shot.
• Pierre-Charles Villeneuve, commander of the combined fleet.
• Federico Gravina, commander of the Spanish squadron.

Consequences

Trafalgar did not end the war, and it did not save Austria, which was defeated at Austerlitz six weeks later. But it ended any realistic French hope of invading Britain and left the Royal Navy free to blockade Europe, protect British trade and land armies where it chose, as it later did in Portugal and Spain.

Unable to beat Britain at sea, Napoleon turned to economic warfare, launching the Continental System in 1806 to close European ports to British goods. France rebuilt warships, but no Franco-Spanish fleet challenged the Royal Navy in a major battle again during the Napoleonic Wars, and Britain remained the leading naval power until the early 20th century.

Myths and facts

• “Kiss me, Hardy.” Some have claimed Nelson said “Kismet” (fate). Eyewitnesses, including the surgeon William Beatty, recorded that Nelson asked Hardy to kiss him and that Hardy did so. Beatty also recorded the words “Thank God I have done my duty”.
• Nelson’s body in rum. Nelson’s body was preserved for the voyage home in a cask of spirits, usually described as brandy, not rum. The sailors’ nickname “Nelson’s blood” for rum grew out of later legends.
• Trafalgar saved Britain from invasion. The invasion plan had already been given up in August, but the battle made sure it could not be revived.

Legacy

Nelson was given a state funeral and buried in St Paul’s Cathedral on 9 January 1806. Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square, completed in 1843, became one of Britain’s best-known monuments, and the Royal Navy still marks Trafalgar Night each year on 21 October.

HMS Victory survives in dry dock at Portsmouth, where she remains a commissioned ship. J. M. W. Turner’s large painting of the battle, commissioned by King George IV, hangs in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Turner returned to the theme in 1839 with The Fighting Temeraire, which shows the veteran of Trafalgar being towed up the Thames to be broken up, a painting regularly voted one of Britain’s favourite works of art. Trafalgar became a symbol of British naval power and national identity throughout the 19th century, until the long peace at sea it began ended with the naval arms race before the First World War.

Timeline

• 1803, May: War between Britain and France resumes.
• 1805, March: Villeneuve’s fleet escapes from Toulon and sails for the West Indies.
• 1805, 22 July: Battle of Cape Finisterre against Calder.
• 1805, late August: Napoleon abandons the invasion of Britain.
• 1805, 28 September: Nelson joins the fleet off Cadiz.
• 1805, 19-20 October: The combined fleet sails from Cadiz.
• 1805, 21 October: Battle of Trafalgar; Nelson is killed.
• 1805, 4 November: Strachan captures Dumanoir’s escaping ships at Cape Ortegal.
• 1806, 9 January: Nelson’s state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral.

Why it matters

Trafalgar gave Britain unchallenged control of the oceans for the rest of the Napoleonic Wars, protecting its trade, empire and island from invasion. Its outcome forced Napoleon to fight Britain by economic means, and Nelson’s tactics and death made it one of the most famous battles in naval history. Britain’s later contribution to Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo rested on the security it won that day.