England expects every man will do his duty.
A few moments later Collingwood in the Royal Sovereign, and Nelson in the Victory, were in the thick of the foreign fleet, which awaited them in disorderly array, but closed about these two, bent upon destroying them if possible before any others could come up. The fury of the duels that ensued, where ships were mixed in disorder, and sometimes three or four against one, passes adequate description. None, perhaps, fared worse than the Belle Isle, a large English two-decker that was the first to reach the scene after the Royal Sovereign, and to draw off some of the fire that threatened to pulverize Collingwood’s ship.
DRAWN FROM THE MODEL IN THE GREENWICH MUSEUM.
NELSON’S SIGNAL.
The wreckage and suffering on other ships were almost as great. The very first broadside of the Royal Sovereign, taking the Santa Ana, struck down 400 out of the 1000 persons aboard; and the Sovereign herself soon lost every mast. The Santissima Trinidada, a Spanish four-decker, and the largest ship then afloat, was reduced to a wreck, and a dozen others lost a part or all of their masts. As for the Victory, she was always in the thick of it, receiving at one time the concentrated fire of seven hostile battle-ships, yet was not too much disabled to be manœuvered. Her captain’s aim was to engage directly with the French flagship Bucentaure, but she was closely attended by three other large ships, and difficult to reach. Nevertheless, the Victory finally got across her stern, and from a few yards distance poured in a broadside which, sweeping the whole length of her interior, dismounted twenty guns, and killed and wounded 400 men. As she passed on, returning the fire of the other vessels near by, she was closely followed by the Temeraire, the second English ship, which had already become almost unmanageable; and a lifting of the smoke showed her smashing a little French frigate, the Redoubtable, which, by and by, was captured after almost every man had been killed, and she was in a sinking condition. The astonishing resistance of this little vessel, and the damage she did by soldiers with muskets crowded in her tops and firing down upon the decks of the English ships, form one of the most noteworthy incidents of naval history; and it is not too much to say that she inflicted upon Great Britain as great harm as all the rest of the allies put together, for it was a musket-ball from the mizzentop of the Redoubtable that struck down, early in the action, the great Nelson himself. He seemed to have had a feeling, even before leaving England, that he would not survive this campaign, and knew his wound was mortal the instant it was received. He was carried below, and remained alive and conscious about three hours, eagerly listening to reports of the progress of the fight, and rejoicing at last in a knowledge of victory. His last words, murmured again and again, with his failing breath, seemed an answer to his signaled injunction, for they were: “Thank God I have done my duty.”
Other men [writes Captain Mahan] have died in the hour of victory, but to no other has victory so singular and so signal stamped the fulfilment and completion of a great life’s work. “Finis coronat opus” has of no man been more true than of Nelson. Results momentous and stupendous were to flow from the annihilation of all sea power except that of Great Britain, which was Nelson’s great achievement; but his part was done when Trafalgar was fought, and his death in the moment of completed success has obtained for that superb victory an immortality of fame which even its own grandeur could scarcely have insured.
No such fleet actions as this ever occurred in North American waters in the time of the “old navy,” though there was plenty of cruising and fighting up and down the coast and in the West Indies. The United States had made its new flag respected before the end of the eighteenth century, but it was done mainly in European waters, where that marvelous captain, Paul Jones, had been defying enemies to the point of rashness.
Paul Jones was the first man to hoist our national ensign (the rattlesnake flag) on an American ship, and again the first to hoist the stars and stripes, and was the ranking officer of the continental navy. He records that “in the Revolution he had twenty-three battles and solemn rencounters by sea; made seven descents in Britain and her colonies; took of her navy two ships of equal and two of far superior force,” and so on. It is true that he alone of his day steadfastly refused to acknowledge England’s supremacy of the seas; that the flag of the United States alone was never struck to Great Britain except under force of honorable combat; and that on the ships commanded by Paul Jones it was never struck at all!
Every Yankee school-boy knows of the terrible fight of the crazy old sloop-of-war Bon Homme Richard against the Serapis, a new English 50-gun frigate in the North Sea, in which a sinking and burning and shot-riddled vessel, able after the first broadside to bring only three or four small guns into practice, conquered and captured her twice-greater antagonist. It is not a story one can tell in a few words, but it was a deed that is regarded in naval annals as among the most extraordinary in the history of the world, and it won for the new republic a credit in Europe that was of vast benefit to it and all its wandering citizens.