The French line was irregular at this point, the ships lying, in some instances, two or three deep, and this made the business of "cutting" the line difficult. As Nelson could not pick out the French flagship, he said to Hardy, "Take your choice, go on board which you please;" and Hardy pointed the stern of the Victory towards a gap between the Redoutable, a 74-gun ship, and the Bucentaure. But the ship moved slowly. The fire upon it was tremendous. One shot drove a shower of splinters upon both Nelson and Hardy; nearly fifty men and officers had been killed or wounded; the Victory's sails were riddled, her studding-sail booms shot off close to the yard-arm, her mizzen-topmast, shot away. At one o'clock, however, the Victory slowly moved past the stern of the Bucentaure, and a 68-pounder carronade on its forecastle, charged with a round shot and a keg of 500 musket balls, was fired into the cabin windows of the French ship. Then, as the great ship moved on, every gun of the remaining fifty that formed its broadside—some of them double and treble loaded—was fired through the Frenchman's cabin windows.
The dust from the crumpled woodwork of the Bucentaure's stern covered the persons of Nelson and the group of officers standing on the Victory's quarter-deck, while the British sailors welcomed with a fierce shout the crash their flying shot made within the Frenchman's hull. The Bucentaure, as it happened—though Nelson was ignorant of the fact—was the French flagship; and after the battle its officers declared that by this single broadside, out of its crew of nearly 1000 men, nearly 400 were struck down, and no less than twenty guns dismounted!
But the Neptune, a fine French 80-gun ship, lay right across the water-lane up which the Victory was moving, and it poured upon the British ship two raking broadsides of the most deadly quality. The Victory, however, moved on unflinchingly, and the Neptune, fearing to be run aboard by the British ship, set her jib and moved ahead; then the Victory swung to starboard on to the Redoutable. The French ship fired one hurried broadside, and promptly shut her lower-deck ports, fearing the British sailors would board through them. No fewer, indeed, than five French line-of-battle ships during the fight, finding themselves grinding sides with British ships, adopted the same course—an expressive testimony to the enterprising quality of British sailors. The Victory, however, with her lower-deck guns actually touching the side of the Redoutable, still kept them in full and quick action; but at each of the lower-deck ports stood a sailor with a bucket of water, and when the gun was fired—its muzzle touching the wooden sides of the Redoutable—the water was dashed upon the ragged hole made by the shot, to prevent the Frenchman taking fire and both ships being consumed.
The guns on the upper deck of the Victory speedily swept and silenced the upper deck of the Redoutable, and as far as its broadsides were concerned, that ship was helpless. Its tops, however, were crowded with marksmen, and armed with brass coehorns, firing langrage shot, and these scourged with a pitiless and most deadly fire the decks of the Victory, while the Bucentaure and the gigantic Santissima Trinidad also thundered on the British flagship.
III. HOW THE VICTORY WAS WON
"All is over and done.
Render thanks to the Giver;
England, for thy son
Let the bell be toll'd.
Render thanks to the Giver,
And render him to the mould.
Under the cross of gold
That shines over city and river,
There he shall rest for ever
Among the wise and the bold."
—TENNYSON.
Nelson's strategy at Trafalgar is described quaintly, but with real insight, in a sentence which a Spanish novelist, Don Perez Galdos, puts into the mouth of one of his characters: "Nelson, who, as everybody knows, was no fool, saw our long line and said, 'Ah, if I break through that in two places, and put the part of it between the two places between two fires, I shall grab every stick of it.' That was exactly what the confounded fellow did. And as our line was so long that the head couldn't help the tail, he worried us from end to end, while he drove his two wedges into our body." It followed that the flaming vortex of the fight was in that brief mile of sea-space, between the two points where the parallel British lines broke through Villeneuve's swaying forest of masts. And the tempest of sound and flame was fiercest, of course, round the two ships that carried the flags of Nelson and Collingwood. As each stately British liner, however, drifted—rather than sailed—into the black pall of smoke, the roar of the fight deepened and widened until the whole space between the Royal Sovereign and the Victory was shaken with mighty pulse-beats of sound that marked the furious and quick-following broadsides.
The scene immediately about the Victory was very remarkable. The Victory had run foul of the Redoutable, the anchors of the two ships hooking into each other. The concussion of the broadsides would, no doubt, have driven the two hulls apart, but that the Victory's studding-sail boom iron had fastened, like a claw, into the leech of the Frenchman's fore-topsail. The Téméraire, coming majestically up through the smoke, raked the Bucentaure, and closed with a crash on the starboard side of the Redoutable, and the four great ships lay in a solid tier, while between their huge grinding sides came, with a sound and a glare almost resembling the blast of an exploding mine, the flash, the smoke, the roar of broadside after broadside.
In the whole heroic fight there is no finer bit of heroism than that shown by the Redoutable. She was only a 74-gun ship, and she had the Victory, of 100 guns, and the Téméraire, of 98, on either side. It is true these ships had to fight at the same time with a whole ring of antagonists; nevertheless, the fire poured on the Redoutable was so fierce that only courage of a steel-like edge and temper could have sustained it. The gallant French ship was semi-dismasted, her hull shot through in every direction, one-fourth of her guns were dismounted. Out of a crew of 643, no fewer than 523 were killed or wounded. Only 35, indeed, lived to reach England as prisoners. And yet she fought on. The fire from her great guns, indeed, soon ceased, but the deadly splutter of musketry from such of her tops as were yet standing was maintained; and, as Brenton put it, "there was witnessed for nearly an hour and a half the singular spectacle of a French 74-gun ship engaging a British first and second rate, with small-arms only."