255 years after the battle, A crawl of floating ship museums toward Trafalgar
Vanity | October 15, 2010 | Nathan Bedford
255 years after the battle, A crawl of floating ship museums toward Trafalgar
Two hundred years after what was arguably the most important sea battle ever fought, the British commemorated their victory at Trafalgar of October 21, 1805 by conducting a review at sea and a mock battle. But, capitulating to political correctness and to a fastidious concern for the presumed sensitivities of their French guests, the British did not name the fleets which reenacted the great battle as "British" and "French" but as "red" and "blue."
So they staged a reenactment without victims, without villains, without victors - without moral content. Despite the presence of her Majesty, adorned by one of her preposterous hats, the affair degenerated into farce made all the more grotesque by the pomp and ceremony for which the Brits are justly famous.
Every generation of British, indeed every generation of English speaking people, have recognized Trafalgar to be a moment of signal historical significance. Trafalgar meant that England would endure, safe behind its channel moat, contriving alliances against the seemingly invincible French Army, waging a worrying flanking war against Napoleon's nepotistic commissars in Spain. England would endure for a decade, safe from invasion, ruling the waves, provisioning itself and its growing list of allies with the fruits of its maritime dominance. Like a giant boa, The Royal Navy would constrict Napoleon's Continental System, ultimately turning his conquered vassals against him.
Let us leave the 2005 review at sea and take a crawling tour of Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory, now a floating museum, but first let us visit another floating museum in New York and, later, one in London.
Aboard ship in New York Harbor one can view a film from the first third of the last century which shows a sailing ship doubling the Horn. The ship, a freighter but still a sailing ship of fine lines, was built of steel. She was nearing the end of her useful life and at the same time she marked the end of an era of high masted sailing ships. The film, really what we as youngsters used to call a "flick" because of the low quality of the film which flickers and skips and jerks but, despite its technical shortcomings, this movie soon captures our attention when it records dramatic scenes taken from atop the mast looking straight down at the hull as it entirely disappears under the sea during a gale off Cape Horn. One marvels that the ship managed to recover. There is nothing to be seen below but sea, not a blue sea or a green or a gray sea, but white foam only and that for an interminably long time until, miraculously, the ship somehow emerges and takes solid form again. The "flick" presents scenes of men working high aloft and we see them at leisure and at their mess. The narrator, himself a crewman, identifies a very great many hands by name, whom we get to know through these pictures, men who later were swept overboard to their deaths. This film can be seen at the Seaport Museum in New York near the Fulton Fish Market and it is also to be found on the Internet.
There is another floating ship's museum nearly 3000 miles away in Portsmouth England, this one a wooden sailing ship, HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar. She is still commissioned in the Royal Navy. One can go through the decks and see the conditions endured by these iron men in this wooden fighting ship. One can see the place where Nelson sustained his mortal wounds at the moment of his greatest triumph. One can also sense the conditions endured month after month and year after year by the sailors who manned these ships of the line.
One can scarcely imagine the fortitude required to conduct a blockade in winter seas month after month during the Nelson era. The sailors did not have space-age water proof Gore-Tex garments snugged about them with Velcro. Their clothes, once impregnated with salt, never dried. Many did not have shoes. Their ships were unheated apart from a single cook stove. Their diets were execrable; the meat was invariably salt pork and rancid. There was seldom enough drinking water and what there was soon became foul. Their bread products were riven with weevils. Their ships were infested with rats. They were chronically afflicted with respiratory infections against which in the cold and the wet they had very little defense and no real medicine. Their existence was four hours on and four hours off of unremitting hardship, danger and misery relieved only by their daily ration of grog.
Nelson's ships were not of steel but of wood and much smaller than the steel vessel pictured off Cape Horn. We can only imagine how much more perilous it must have been for the seamen conducting a blockade in heavy seas off France and Spain. Nelson himself did not set foot on dry land for two years. By the time of the Battle of Trafalgar he had sacrificed an arm and an eye in the service of his country. He had known hardship himself, having served in the Baltic and even in the Arctic where he had stood his watches.
Let us take a detour to another floating ship Museum, this one, HMS Belfast, is anchored in the River Thames. Belfast is an old and outmoded 20th-century warship with not too much in common with HMS Victory except one feature that struck me, the watch stations were fully exposed to the elements. It was from those watch stations that the Battle of the Atlantic was waged and ultimately won.
Because Nelson had inspirited the Royal Navy to adopt his patriotism, professionalism and courage, it had become a shining turn of the century example of a meritocracy. Most Americans do not appreciate the debt we as a democracy and a land of milk and honey owe to the Royal Navy nor are we aware of the debt the Royal Navy owes to the example of Horatio Viscount, Lord Nelson. In fact, the Senior Service quite consciously modeled itself after the legend of Nelson and it is not an exaggeration to say that in the Battle of the Atlantic the officer of the watch, exposed to the frozen gloom of the Arctic winter, stood to his duty against all hardship, conscious that he was following Nelson who himself had endured the same hardships in the same waters.
A decade after Trafalgar, England would hurl the world against the fanaticism of the French Leftists. Napoleon would be weakened by the flank attacks of the Bull Dog. He would be bled white of troops and treasure. But mostly, the decade respite bought by Trafalgar would see the Corsican Tyrant made vulnerable by his own ego, his ill judged invasion of Russia, and the internal corruption of his post Jacobin tyranny. A decade after Trafalgar, they would break him at Waterloo.
Because of Trafalgar England would endure. Because of Trafalgar, America would ascend. The Royal Navy would rule the waves for more than a century spreading democracy, decency and the rule of law around the globe while policing the waterways of the world and interdicting the slave trade. Its gunboats would police waterways of the Third World and bring civilization while it kept the barbarians at bay-a boon to the world now despised as "gunboat diplomacy." A century and a half later, the Royal Navy would pass the baton to the American Navy who would assume the role of the world's policeman. The traditions of the Royal Navy, like British common law, have been absorbed by the American Navy as has the mission. HMS Victory was the equivalent of the American Nimitz class super carrier of its day and it cost relatively as much of its country's GDP.
Because of Trafalgar, England would answer the call at its Finest Hour because they had done it before and so they knew they could do it again.
Every generation of British have recognized the signal historical significance of Trafalgar - except, evidently, the last.
