H.M.S Victory - Iain Ballantyne & Jonathan Eastland
THE HORROR OF WAR
In this edited extract from their book on The fighting life of
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A COUPLE of enemy shot passed over the quarterdeck, but then a third hit Secretary John Scott, who had been loyally pacing up and down beside Admiral Horatio Nelson taking notes. In fact, Scott was discussing a point with Captain Thomas Hardy, the Victory’s Commanding Officer, when he was cleaved in two; his mangled remains gathered up by Captain Adair of the Royal Marines and a sailor to be bundled over the side. It was a sad end for one of Nelson’s most diligent servants.
In May 1803, right at the beginning of his adventure,
Scott had written to his wife Charlotte, discussing high hopes of a generous
reward represented by his share of prizes Victory might take. His
appointment to the Nelson’s staff, with an annual salary of £300,
had seemed to be worth the risk. Hard working and modest, Scott had won Nelson’s
trust and affection. Now,on October 21 1805, only a large pool of blood marked
the spot where he had been. Nelson looked around and remarked in sorrow:
‘Is that poor Scott that is gone?…Poor fellow.’
More blood was spilled when a bar shot intended to cut rigging instead mowed
down a file of Royal Marines standing proud on the poop deck, killing eight
of them. Lieutenant Lewis Rotely RMs admired the foolhardy bravery of standing
to attention while death came on, but he later wondered why an order for the
marines to lie down could not have been given.
‘…no man went down until knocked down; had such orders been
given many a life would have been saved.’
Hardy and Nelson had their own close shave when a cannon ball tore through
some hammocks, hit a boat and then was deflected to pass between them. The
two men paused to check each other over. A wood splinter had taken the buckle
off one of Hardy’s shoes and bruised his foot, but neither man was otherwise
injured. Nelson felt the enemy fire was now coming so fast and thick that soon Victory would
surely be cutting through the line to give them a taste of their own medicine.
The Admiral remarked:
‘This is too warm work, Hardy, to last long.’
The Victory endured forty minutes in which she could not bring her
fire to bear, for she was for the most part bows on to the enemy, or not close
enough to enable her double and triple shotted cannons to reach, the only reply
coming from an accidental discharge by one of her guns. The butcher’s
bill had been twenty men killed and thirty wounded. To the French, pouring
fire into her, the Victory ‘seemed like some phantom; unassailable
by mortal men; the mute slow-footed minister of Fate.’
As she cut the Franco-Spanish line HMS Victory passed so close to
the stern of the Bucentaure that her yardarms passed over the other
ship’s poop deck. At 1.00pm Victory’s 68pdr carronade
hurled a massive round shot and a keg containing 500 musket balls through Bucentaure’s
stern windows and then, in quick succession, the larboard broadside guns spat
shot, while the cannons on the quarterdeck and upper gun deck sprayed grapeshot.
Gunners in the 104-gun British first-rate listened with satisfaction to the
crash of their shot carving a path of destruction from one end of the enemy
ship to the other. The Bucentaure ceased to be an effective fighting
vessel, with scores of dead and wounded and many of her guns dismounted. The
impact of such raking fire was truly horrific, creating a scene that defied
the imagination as was later noted by an account of the battle:
‘The dead, thrown back as they fell, lay along the middle of the
decks in heaps, and the shot passing through had frightfully mangled the bodies…An
extraordinary proportion had lost their heads.’
One solid shot had ricocheted around, killing or wounding at least forty men,
like some obscene pinball collecting ‘points’.
The French Neptune raked Victory from ahead as the British
warship crashed into the Redoubtable, knocking people off their feet.
The gunners in both ships now applied themselves to their grim task.
While his father, Gunner William Rivers, was deep inside the ship supervising
the filling of powder cartridges and their distribution to the guns, young
Midshipman William Rivers was busy running messages for Nelson. He became the
latest victim of enemy fire on the quarterdeck, later recalling that he was
felled ‘while receiving orders from his late Lordship [sustaining] a
wound on the face’ namely a splinter than knocked out three teeth ‘which
was shortly afterwards followed with a gunshot wound which carried away my
left leg.’ Midshipman Rivers took himself below from the quarterdeck,
his foot hanging by a flap of skin, but he did not forget to collect his shoes.
He had been barefoot, to ensure he had a good grip while latterly helping to
man the upper deck guns.
The casualties also began to mount on the poop deck, which had become ‘a
slaughterhouse’ with half the forty marines already dead or wounded.
Captain Adair, understanding the French tactics, called Second Lieutenant Rotely
to him.
‘Captain Adair… ordered me to bring him up a reinforcement
of Marines from the great guns.’
As he went below decks, Rotely realized separating the men from their guns
might prove to be very difficult.
‘In the excitement of action the Marines had thrown off their red
jackets and appeared in check shirts and blue trousers. There was no distinguishing
Marine from Seaman – they were all working like horses.’
Victory was engaging Redoubtable on the starboard side
at point blank range.
On her larboard, Victory was exchanging fire with the Spanish Santissima
Trinidad, among others. Meanwhile, Rotely found his senses assaulted
on all sides:
‘I was now upon the middle deck…every gun was going off. A
man should witness a battle in a three-decker from the middle deck, for it
beggars all description. It bewilders the senses of sight and hearing. There
was the fire from above, the fire from below, besides the fire from the deck
I was upon, the guns recoiling with violence…reports louder than thunder,
the deck heaving and side straining. I fancied myself in the infernal regions,
where every man appeared a devil. Lips might move, but orders and hearing were
out of the question: everything was done by signs.’
The marines were in the grip of bloodlust, the red mist over their eyes, and
some had to be forcibly separated from their bucking guns, with the assistance
of two sergeants and a couple of corporals. Rotely ascended into ‘purer
air’ with twenty-five Royal Marines, but he had swapped one form of Hell
for another. French soldiers in the tops were picking off British officers
and men with lethal accuracy and repeated attempts were being made to clamber
aboard. Captain Adair had only ten men left and had been wounded in the forehead
by wood splinters. But this didn’t stop him raising a musket and, taking
aim, shouting:
‘Rotely, fire away as fast as you can.’
According to most accounts, within seconds a musket ball hit Adair in the back
of the neck, killing him instantly. On seeing Adair’s body being
carried away, Nelson remarked:
‘There goes poor Adair, I may be next to follow him.’
Admiral Nelson and Captain Hardy were the epitome of traditional British cool
in the face of enemy fire, casually walking back and forth on the quarterdeck
between the shattered wheel and the ladderway down to the Great Cabin. At
1.15pm, Nelson span around one step short of his usual turning point. Hardy
found the admiral on his knees, left hand on the deck in a slippery pool
of Scott's blood. Suddenly, the admiral’s arm gave way and he collapsed,
rolling onto his left side, his uniform soaking up Scott’s blood. Fearing
the worst Hardy rushed over, his words masking the dreadful truth.
‘I trust that your Lordship is not severely wounded?’
The admiral gasped:
‘They have done for me at last, Hardy…My backbone is
shot through.’
Hardy ordered Sergeant Secker of the Royal Marines and two sailors to lift
the admiral up and carry him below decks. The fatal shot had clearly come from
a French soldier firing from the Redoubtable’s mizzen top, about
forty-five-feet up to the right. It is reckoned, despite claims made later,
that the soldier who hit Nelson was not aiming specifically at the British
admiral. He just got lucky. Ironically, Victory had no marines in
her tops to counter the enemy’s sharpshooters, as Nelson forbade it on
account of the danger from musket fire setting fire to her sails. Frustrated
at being repelled despite many attempts to board Victory, Redoubtable’s
gunners put them on maximum elevation and began blasting round shot up through
the Victory’s quarterdeck, sending lethal splinters flying in
all directions. Among the casualties was twenty-one-year-old Midshipman William
Ram, a gloomy Irishman who never seemed to be satisfied with life. He received
multiple injuries that left him in indescribable agony.
In the charnel house hades that was Victory’s cockpit the Surgeon, Dr William Beatty and his assistants continued their desperate work to save lives.
On inspecting the mangled leg of Midshipman Rivers, Dr Beatty decided amputation
was needed. Held down by two surgical assistants, the youngster gritted his
teeth and waited for the saw to bite. Beatty amputated four inches below
the knee.
Meanwhile, Midshipman Ram could bear no more agony and, having received a tourniquet
around a shattered limb, he untied it and let himself bleed to death. As was
the custom during battle, his body was thrown overboard. Washed ashore some
days later, it was discovered by some British prisoners of war who sought the
permission of the Governor of Cadiz to give Ram a decent Christian burial.
While Ram’s last moments and burial on a foreign shore may be no more
than a footnote, the death of Lord Nelson has come to be one of the defining
moments in British history, a drawn out melodrama. He finally expired at 4.30pm
with firing dying away and a British victory assured.
Eighteen enemy ships of the line had been taken as prizes or destroyed, while
the British had lost not a single ship. Beyond Victory lay
a scene from Hell: The French 74-gun Achille blazed brightly and would
soon explode - a cataclysm visible to the horror-stricken residents of Cadiz
- and amid the smoke lying thick on the surface of the sea could be seen the
ragged silhouettes of other mortally wounded ships, their masts cut down, upper
decks covered in an anarchy of torn sails and frayed rigging, their sides pock-marked
and punctured. Warship interiors were smeared with blood and
the litter of butchered limbs and entrails. Because they did not throw their
dead overboard during battle there were piles of mutilated corpses inside the
French and Spanish ships.
The total casualties on the British side were 1,692 killed and wounded, while
the Franco-Spanish suffered 6,953 casualties, with 20,000 taken prisoner.
Aboard Victory, they were clearing up the terrible debris of battle,
administering to the wounded and even looking after the wretched enemy: a number
had swum over from nearby ships, including three Spaniards from the 74-gun Bahama.
Gunner Rivers went down to the cockpit, to visit his badly wounded son. Searching
the rows of wounded, he found it hard to see the guttering candlelight but
a cheerful voice suddenly called to him from the shadows:
‘Here I am father, nothing is the matter with me, only lost my leg and
that in a good cause.’
Midshipman Rivers asked the Surgeon if he could be helped back to his cabin
by his father, for anywhere was better than the gore-splattered cockpit filled
with the moaning of maimed men. Gunner Rivers tucked his boy into his cot and
while he may have been a tough sailor, who, like his son, had seen more than
one action in Victory, it would be a hard-hearted father who would
not choke back a tear while watching over his seriously wounded son. At around
midnight the youngster was disturbed by the sound of movement overhead, followed
by splashes as several things were thrown over the side. ‘Are they throwing
arms and legs overboard?’ he asked his dad, who nodded, knowing that
it was the custom of Surgeons to dispose of amputated limbs in the dead of
night.
‘Have they thrown mine?’
Gunner Rivers, probably overcome with emotion, could only manage:
‘I don’t know.’
Meanwhile, Nelson’s body still lay in the cockpit and the morning after
the battle Lieutenant Rotely went down to pay his respects to the admiral.
The young marine officer hoped to procure a lock of hair as a memento. He would
keep the lock in a ring for the rest of his life. It was Lieutenant Rotely
who supervised the delicate process of placing the corpse of Nelson inside
a cask filled with brandy, ensuring its preservation for the long journey home.
‘The body was brought up by two men from the cockpit. I received it and
placed [it] head foremost in the cask. The head of the cask was then replaced
and filled with brandy, and a Marine sentinel placed over it by night or day,
so that it was impossible for anyone to approach it unseen.’
Throughout October 22 and 23, great efforts were made to repair battle
damage and create a jury-rig, hopefully enabling Victory to make Gibraltar
despite the storm that had swept in from the Atlantic. Gunner Rivers
helped supervise the clearing up of ‘wreckage, yards and masts’,
which included many gruesome discoveries.
‘found a marine on the poop under the mizen mast…as it fell fore
and aft, his musket bent over his shoulders with his bayonet fixed and in his
back, dead. Another marine with his musket close to his breast with his arm
around the butt and his musket bent over his shoulder dead – another
musket found with the hand grasp fast to it, the body gone. Number of marines
lay on the forecastle dead with their muskets to their breast as if they were
going to fire…the sight was shocking to behold.’
It was truly the horror of war that the glory of even Trafalgar cannot mask.
The scale of carnage in the British ships is often forgotten, as are casualties
other than Nelson. The true face of war retains its power to shock even now,
200 years later.
• Taken from ‘H.M.S.
VICTORY’, by Iain Ballantyne & Jonathan
Eastland
Available from Pen & Sword
Books,
Copyright 2005 © Iain Ballantyne & Jonathan
Eastland.