Twenty minutes after the Sovereign had by herself beaten off the Fougueux, the leading British ships following astern of the Sovereign began to reach the spot, and to take off her enemies one by one, except the Santa Anna. With Admiral Alava’s flagship the Royal Sovereign continued in close encounter, until the Santa Anna’s colours came down. It was just at that moment that Collingwood received, by an officer of the Victory, Captain Hardy’s first message that Lord Nelson had been “dangerously wounded.”
The stubborn stand that the Santa Anna made was a disappointment, it would appear, to the Sovereign’s men. Their terrible raking broadside at the outset had plainly “sickened” the Spaniards—as our men expressively put it—and many on board believed that the enemy must surrender forthwith. Captain Rotheram, indeed, “came up to the Admiral, and, shaking him by the hand, said: ‘I congratulate you, sir; she is slackening her fire, and must soon strike!’” The gallant fellows who were fighting at the Royal Sovereign’s guns actually thought, it is on record, that their ship would have the proud distinction of capturing an enemy’s flagship in the midst of her own fleet before another British ship had got into action. In the end, though, they had this consolation: when at length the Santa Anna did surrender; “No ship besides ourselves fired a shot at her,” wrote one of the Sovereign’s officers, “and you can have no conception how completely she was ruined.” “Her side,” wrote Collingwood himself, “was almost entirely beat in.”
“The Santa Anna,” to quote Mr. Newnham Collingwood, “struck at half-past two o’clock, about the time when the news of Lord Nelson’s wound was communicated to Admiral Collingwood, but the Royal Sovereign had been so much injured in her masts and yards by the ships that lay on her bow and quarter that she was unable to alter her position. Admiral Collingwood accordingly called the Euryalus to take her in tow, and make the necessary signals. He dispatched Captain Blackwood to convey the Spanish Admiral on board the Euryalus, but he was stated to be at the point of death, and Captain Blackwood returned with the Spanish captain. That officer had already been to the Royal Sovereign to deliver his sword, and on entering had asked one of the English sailors the name of the ship. When he was told that it was the Royal Sovereign, he replied, in broken English, while patting one of the guns with his hand, ‘I think she should be called the Royal Devil!’”
The Royal Sovereign, on the Santa Anna surrendering, pushed off from her giant prize—so big a ship, indeed, that, in Collingwood’s own words, she “towered over the Sovereign like a castle.” She moved away to seek another enemy. But the fall of her main and mizen-masts, cut through and through by shot, prevented her from taking a further part in the battle until after being taken in tow by the Euryalus frigate, Captain Blackwood’s ship. The Sovereign was able after that, during the rest of the action, to employ her broadsides here and there. Her last piece of work was at the very close of the battle, when she formed one of the group of ships that Captain Hardy summoned round the Victory to support the dying chief’s flagship against a threatened attack on the Victory from the fresh ships of the French van squadron as they passed down the line.
The Royal Sovereign’s list of casualties, as officially reported on the morning after Trafalgar, amounted to forty-seven men killed and ninety-four wounded.
How Collingwood first heard of Nelson’s fate he himself has told us:
“When my dear friend received his wound,” wrote the Admiral, “he immediately sent an officer to tell me of it, and give his love to me. Though the officer was directed to say the wound was not dangerous, I read in his countenance what I had to fear, and before the action was over Captain Hardy came to inform me of his death. I cannot tell you how deeply I was affected; my friendship for him was unlike any thing that I have left in the Navy—a brotherhood of more than thirty years.”
Writing to the Duke of Clarence, an old service friend of Collingwood’s and of Nelson’s as well, he said this:
“He (Nelson) sent an officer to inform me that he was wounded. I asked the officer if his wound was dangerous. He hesitated, then said he hoped it was not; but I saw the fate of my friend in his eye, for his look told what his tongue could not utter. About an hour after, when the action was over, Captain Hardy brought me the melancholy account of his death.”
Another detail of Trafalgar that may be news to some of us is the fact that Collingwood was wounded in the battle. He said nothing about himself to any one in any of his letters at the time, nor did he include himself in the return of wounded sent to the Admiralty. It was only in response to an anxious inquiry from his wife, who, some months afterwards, heard a rumour about it and wrote to inquire, that Collingwood, five months after the battle, first made mention of the matter. His letter to Lady Collingwood is dated March 29, 1806, and in it the Admiral says: