Books: England Expects …

DECISION AT TRAFALGAR (381 pp.)—Dudley Pope—Llppincott ($5.95).

It was a great victory, perhaps the greatest in Britain’s history, and it had been bought at great price, the life of Britain’s greatest hero. But only the naval garrison and a few Britons beleaguered in the shadow of Gibraltar’s rock knew what had happened off Cape Trafalgar that October day in 1805. A howling westerly gale bedeviled Cuthbert Collingwood, Vice Admiral of the Blue, who had succeeded to command of the victorious British fleet, and his ships were fighting for their lives, trying to claw off a lee shore. Five days whistled through the rigging before Collingwood could dispatch the tidings on which the world hung.

The tiny topsail schooner Pickle leaked and bucked her way past Spanish Finisterre, through Biscay’s Bay, past French Finistere, and English Land’s End, to Falmouth. The “telegraph” (semaphore) to London was unfinished. So Pickle’s skipper, Lieut. John Richards Lapenotiere, jounced for 37 hours in a post chaise to Whitehall. It was 16 days after the fleet’s guns fell silent that Lapenotiere rode through Admiralty Arch, strode into the secretary’s office and announced baldly: “Sir, we have gained a great victory, but we have lost Lord Nelson.”*

Fray & Frazzle. Of recent books from both sides of the Channel about the greatest battle of the age of sail (Trafalgar, by Oliver Warner; Trafalgar, by Rene Maine), Dudley Pope, 34, British yachtsman, newsman, and merchant mariner, has written the best. In it he tries, and for the most part successfully, to reconstruct the historic engagement as it was seen by both officers and men, not only of the British Navy but of the Combined Fleets of France and Spain.

The maritime might of France had been destroyed in the egalitarian fury of the Revolution, when brilliant naval officers, no matter how patriotic, were guillotined merely because they were of noble birth. And egalitarianism (as any latterday weekend yachtsman knows) does not work afloat. Worse yet, Napoleon had no understanding of sea power—let alone naval strategy and tactics. He frayed the already frazzled nerves of his naval commander in chief, the vacillating Villeneuve, with whimsically changing orders. For two years his captains were reduced to an exasperating game of maritime hide-and-seek until Horatio Viscount Nelson, Vice Admiral of the White, hero of Copenhagen and the Nile, caught Villeneuve outside Cadiz and began the Battle of Trafalgar.

But if the French and Spanish navies were rotten to their garboard strakes, Pope makes clear that the British was rotten to its keelson. Its ships were badly designed and badly built. Crews were made up largely of pressed men, recruited by a system of legalized kidnaping. They were fed swill unfit for swine, and discipline was inhumanly savage by today’s standards. But long years of keeping the sea, often for 18 months without making port, made them magnificent seamen. Something else, which Pope finds hard to define, made them patriots. And Admiral

Nelson, scrawny, one-eyed, one-armed, vainglorious little man of 47, who also happened to be the most inspiring naval commander of his era, made them fight like killer whales.

Coffin in the Cabin. Pope knows his sea lore well, and though a few pages may make heavy weather for a landlubber, he has captured the salty flavor of the times as effectively as his hero’s ships made prizes of their foes. Nelson the hypochondriac, querulously insecure and suffering so strong a death fixation that he sailed for years with his coffin in his cabin (it was not there when needed at Trafalgar) becomes agreeably human. Of his last minutes at home with his mistress Lady Hamilton and their “adopted” daughter, Pope writes: “Upstairs Nelson … went quietly to the bedside of his daughter, conceived aboard the Fondroyant in the warm Mediterranean more than five years earlier. The little man knelt. Resting his head in his hand, he said a quiet prayer, and tiptoed out of the room and out of Horatia’s life forever.”

Five weeks later, dying amid the thunder of the guns, the reek of black powder and the ‘tween-deck stench of a 40-year-old wooden ship of the line, prophetically named Victory, Nelson bequeathed his beloved Emma and Horatia “as a legacy to my Country.” But his country betrayed him. Lord Nelson’s womenfolk lived out their lives in degrading poverty. The admiral’s final and most famous signal as his fleet was entering battle, “England expects that every man will do his duty,” did not work in reverse.

* Legend has it that ten years later, after a comparable British victory at Waterloo, the banking House of Rothschild got the word by carrier pigeon within hours, made a killing on London’s Stock Exchange.