In England's song for ever
She's the Fighting Téméraire.
Henry Newbolt.
Trafalgar was her day. It was at Trafalgar that the Téméraire made her mark and won undying fame.
First of all—
She came to Nelson's aid,
The battle's brunt to bear,
And nobly sought to lead the van,
The Brave Old Téméraire.
Then she was 'the Victory's companion in her closing strife,' as Mr. Ruskin has called the Téméraire, 'prevailing over the fatal vessel that had given Nelson death.'[79] That is one of the reasons why people remember the Téméraire. There is another—that all the world knows. To learn it one has only to visit the National Gallery. Turner's masterpiece has made the Téméraire's name a household word all the world over. But, all the same, had Turner never painted his picture at all, even without the aid of Turner's magic brush, the Téméraire must surely, for the part she took in the greatest sea-fight of history, have achieved for her name an immortal renown.
How Turner came to paint his 'Fighting Téméraire' is a story in itself. The famous picture came into being by the merest accident; as the outcome of a happy chance, as the result of a casual meeting with the old ship at a water-picnic on the Thames one autumn evening of the year 1838.[80] Turner, with Clarkson Stanfield and some friends, was boating off Greenwich marshes in Blackwall Reach when the old ship passed them, coming up the river from Sheerness to meet her destined end off Rotherhithe, where the shipbreaker Beatson's men were waiting for her. She had been sold out of the service some days before for £5530, barely the market value of the copper bolts that held her timbers together—just a twelfth of the prime cost of the ship's hull in labour and materials, or one-twentieth of the total value of the ship, gunned and equipped for sea. Forlorn enough, and a thing for pity, looked the grand old man-of-war as the Sheerness men had left her, her sails stripped from the yards, her tiers of ports without guns and closed down, her hull with its last coat of dockyard drab all rusty-looking and weather-stained, cast off and discarded, as it were a broken warrior being borne to a pauper's grave.
['Turner saw the tug and ship just before entering Greenwich Reach, and when before rounding the Isle of Dogs she would be steering about South-South-East up Blackwall Reach, with the summer setting sun astern of her in the North-North-West.'—Mr. R.C. Leslie in the Athenæum.]