look closer

Signal flags climb the rear mast of the Victory: England expects that every man will do his duty. The real signal came down before the first broadside, and Turner flew it anyway.

For two years the British fleet has been waiting for this morning. It has blockaded, chased the enemy across the Atlantic to the West Indies and back, and worn its ships ragged keeping 33 French and Spanish sail bottled up in Cádiz. Two days ago they came out. Now, off Cape Trafalgar, the wind has nearly died: the fleets close at a walking pace, and there is time, too much time, for everything. The crews eat an early dinner. Men write wills on gun carriages and pin them to the mast for the purser. On several ships the bands play. Everyone from admiral to powder boy can do the arithmetic of what is coming. The textbook says a fleet fights in a line, broadside to broadside, until arithmetic decides. Nelson has read the textbook and intends to burn it. Weeks ago, over dinner, he explained the plan to his captains and watched some of them weep at the boldness of it. He called it, without modesty, the Nelson touch. He splits 27 ships into two columns and aims them like spears at the middle of the enemy line. Bows exposed, guns silent, most of an hour of approach under full fire with no way to answer. He wants the signal to say that England confides that every man will do his duty. Confides is not in the flag code and expects is, so expects it becomes. Collingwood, leading the second column, is first into the fire, and says to his flag captain: what would Nelson give to be here. Then Victory breaks the line, firing a double-shotted broadside through the stern windows of the French flagship as she passes. The battle becomes what he wanted: a brawl at pistol range, hulls grinding, where British gun crews reload twice as fast. At a quarter past one, a musketeer in the fighting top of the Redoutable, 50 feet away, finds the small figure with four stars on his coat. The ball goes through shoulder and spine. Nelson is carried down to the dark of the orlop deck with a handkerchief spread over his face so the gun crews will not see who it is. He lives three more hours, long enough to hear the cheers rolling through the ship as each enemy strikes her colors. By the end of the afternoon 17 have struck, and not one British ship is lost. Kiss me, Hardy, he says to his captain, and then: thank God I have done my duty. The sea gives nothing away for free. That night a storm comes up off the cape and wrecks most of the captured prizes against the Spanish shore. Collingwood, now in command, spends the gale sending boats to pull enemy sailors out of the water they had been shooting across at midday. Victory comes home under jury rig with her admiral below decks, preserved in a cask of spirits for the state funeral London is already planning. The fleet he built fought exactly one more general action in the next hundred years, because nobody cared to try again. The ocean is England’s for a century.