Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe’s Trafalgar

The Victory’s high casualty rate was partly caused by Lucas’s tactics of drenching her with musket fire and partly because she was the first British ship into the northern part of the enemy’s fleet and so fought alone for a brief time. She was also flying the admiral’s pennant and so became a target for several enemy ships. Collingwood’s flagship, the Royal Sovereign, first into the southern part of the enemy fleet and also flying an admiral’s pennant, lost 47 men dead and had 94 wounded, the greatest casualties of any ship in Collingwood’s squadron. Admirals led from the front.

The battle was truly decisive. It so shocked the morale of the French and Spanish navies that neither recovered for the remainder of the Napoleonic wars. British sea power was supreme, and stayed so until the beginning of the twentieth century. Nelson, more than any man, imposed Britain on the nineteenth-century world. It is often said that his tactics were revolutionary, and so they were in the context of eighteenth-century naval warfare where the accepted mode of fighting one fleet against another was to form parallel lines of battle and fight it out broadside to broadside. Yet, in 1797, off Camperdown, Admiral Duncan had formed his fleet of sixteen British battleships into two squadrons that he sailed straight into the broadsides of eighteen Dutch ships of the line, and by battle’s end he had captured eleven of those ships and lost none of his own. This is not to denigrate Nelson, who had proved his resourcefulness time and again, but it suggests the Royal Navy was open to innovative thinking in those desperate years. It was also extraordinarily confident. By sailing his squadrons directly at the enemy line, Nelson, like Duncan before him, was gambling that his ships could survive continuous raking. They did, and proceeded to mangle the enemy. At Trafalgar, for at least twenty minutes at the opening of the battle, the British ships could not fire a single shot, while a dozen of the enemy could fire at will. Nelson knew that, risked that and was certain he could win despite that. It was not until the Royal Navy fought the U.S. Navy in the war of 1812 that British gunnery met its equal, but the U.S. Navy did not deploy battleships and so could only be a minor nuisance to a worldwide fleet which was by then globally preeminent.

Did any man serve at both Trafalgar and Waterloo? I know of only one. Don Miguel Ricardo Maria Juan de la Mata Domingo Vincente Ferre Alava de Esquivel, mercifully known as Miguel de Alava, was an officer in the Spanish navy in 1805 and served aboard the Spanish admiral’s flagship, the Principe de Asturias. That ship fought nobly at Trafalgar and, though she was hurt badly, managed to avoid capture and escaped back to Cadiz. Four years later Alava had become an officer in the Spanish army. Spain had changed sides by then, and the Spanish army was allied with the British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, as it fought in the Peninsula, and General de Alava was appointed Wellington’s Spanish liaison officer and the two became extremely close friends, a friendship that endured till their deaths. De Alava stayed with Wellington until the end of the Peninsular War when he was appointed the Spanish ambassador to the Netherlands and so was able to join the allies at the Battle of Waterloo where he remained at Wellington’s side throughout the day. He had no need to be there, yet his presence was undoubtedly a help to Wellington who trusted de Alava’s judgment and valued his advice. Nearly all of Wellington’s aides were killed or wounded, yet he and de Alava survived unhurt. So Miguel de Alava fought against the British at Trafalgar and for them at Waterloo, a strange career indeed. Sharpe joins de Alava in surviving that remarkable double.

I am enormously grateful to Peter Goodwin, the Historical Consultant, Keeper and Curator of HMS Victory, for his notes on the manuscript, and to Katy Ball, Curator at Portsmouth Museums and Records Office. The errors which survive are all my own, or can be blamed on Richard Sharpe, a soldier adrift in a strange nautical world. He will be back on land soon, where he belongs, and will march again.