The Battle of Trafalgar: Nelson's Final Triumph and His Strange Journey Home
Updated: Oct 21
At about quarter to noon on 21 October 1805, with HMS Victory roughly a mile and a half from the enemy line, a string of coloured flags started climbing her mast. It took twelve separate hoists to spell out what Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson wanted to say to his fleet. Within about an hour and a half he'd been shot. By half past four he was dead, and Britain had won one of the most complete naval victories in its history.
The Battle of Trafalgar is usually told as a neat story of genius and sacrifice. The real version is messier and a lot stranger. The famous signal almost said something else. The admiral's dying request embarrassed the Victorians so much that some tried to rewrite it. Most of the captured ships were lost in a storm within days, and Nelson himself came home in a barrel of brandy that, at one point, partly blew its lid off.
Battle of Trafalgar: Quick Answers
When and where: 21 October 1805, off Cape Trafalgar on the south-west coast of Spain, between Cádiz and the Strait of Gibraltar.
Who fought: 27 British ships of the line under Nelson against 33 French and Spanish ships under Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve.
Who won: Britain, decisively. The British captured 17 enemy ships, destroyed another and didn't lose a single one of their own.
How Nelson died: A French marksman on the Redoutable hit him with a musket ball at about 1.15pm. He died below decks at around 4.30pm, aged 47.
His last words: "Thank God I have done my duty", repeated until he couldn't speak. And yes, he really did ask Hardy to kiss him.
What happened to his body: It was kept in a cask of brandy for the voyage home and buried in St Paul's Cathedral on 9 January 1806.
Why the Battle of Trafalgar Happened
By 1805 Napoleon had a huge army camped along the Channel coast and a simple problem: he couldn't get it across. To invade Britain he needed command of the sea, even for a few days, and that meant pulling the Royal Navy out of position. The plan was for Villeneuve to lure the British fleet away to the Caribbean, double back and gather enough French and Spanish ships to cover the crossing.
It didn't work. Nelson chased Villeneuve across the Atlantic and back, the combined fleet ended up bottled up in Cádiz, and Napoleon lost patience. By the autumn he'd marched his invasion army east to fight Austria instead. He took the surrender of an entire Austrian army at Ulm on 20 October, the day before Trafalgar, which tells you how far the invasion had already slipped down his list. When Villeneuve finally led the combined fleet out of Cádiz, he was heading for the Mediterranean, not England.
Nelson was waiting just over the horizon. It's worth remembering that Napoleon wasn't finished, not by a long way. It took him another decade, an island exile and a dramatic escape before his career ended for good at Waterloo. But after Trafalgar, he never again seriously threatened to invade Britain.
How Nelson Got Here: The Admiral Who Kept Losing Bits of Himself
By the morning of the battle, Nelson was 47 and already a national celebrity, and his body carried the receipts. He'd lost most of the sight in his right eye at the siege of Calvi on Corsica in 1794, when a shot hit the ground nearby and threw stones and sand into his face. Three years later a musket ball shattered his right arm during a failed night attack on Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and the arm came off on board ship with no anaesthetic. He was back at sea within months.
We've covered his early life and rise in full in our piece on Horatio Nelson's journey from frail boy to national hero, so here's the short version. He'd married Frances Nisbet, a young widow he met on the Caribbean island of Nevis, in 1787. In 1798 he destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, where the French flagship L'Orient caught fire and exploded in one of the biggest blasts anyone at sea had ever seen.
Recovering in Naples afterwards, he fell for Emma, Lady Hamilton, wife of the British envoy. It turned into one of the great scandals of the age. He left Frances, Emma gave birth to their daughter Horatia in 1801, and the three of them (four, counting the remarkably tolerant Sir William Hamilton) became the gossip of Georgian London.
Later that year came Copenhagen, where Nelson famously ignored his commanding officer's signal to break off the action by putting his telescope to his blind eye and claiming he couldn't see it. He won anyway. By 1805 he'd built a reputation for doing exactly what he thought was right, and the Admiralty had more or less learned to let him.
The Codicil He Wrote That Morning
Before a shot was fired, Nelson went to his cabin and added a codicil to his will. He wrote it on board Victory, in sight of the enemy fleet, and it wasn't about money or prizes. It was about Emma. He listed the diplomatic services he believed she'd done for Britain in Naples and asked the King and the nation to give her what he called "ample provision to maintain her rank in life". He also left Horatia, whom he described as his adopted daughter, to the country's care.
Then he knelt and wrote a prayer asking for victory and for humanity after it. Whatever else you think of Nelson, he clearly had a fair idea he might not see the evening.
England Expects: The Signal That Nearly Said Something Else
The most famous signal in British history very nearly read differently. Nelson's original wording was "England confides that every man will do his duty", meaning England trusts its men to do it. He dictated it to his flag lieutenant, John Pasco, who ran Victory's signals. Pasco suggested a change. The fleet was using Sir Home Popham's new telegraphic code, where common words had their own flag combinations. "Expects" was already in the code book. "Confides" wasn't, so it would have had to be spelled out letter by letter, which would have taken ages.
Nelson agreed, apparently without much fuss, and the message went up as "England expects that every man will do his duty." Not everyone loved it. Some sailors grumbled that of course they'd do their duty, they always did. Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, leading the second column, is said to have muttered that he wished Nelson would stop signalling, since everyone knew what to do.
Once a few ships had acknowledged it, Nelson had the signal that actually mattered hoisted: No. 16, "engage the enemy more closely". It flew from Victory's main topgallant masthead until enemy fire shot it away. He'd used the same signal at the Nile and at Copenhagen.
The Nelson Touch: Straight at the Enemy
The standard way to fight a fleet battle in the 18th century was for both sides to form long parallel lines and blast away at each other. It usually ended in a draw. Nelson hated it. His plan, which he'd explained to his captains over dinner weeks before and which they called the Nelson Touch, was to split his fleet into two columns and drive them straight through the enemy line at right angles.
It was a big gamble. Sailing head on meant the leading British ships had to absorb broadsides for a long time without being able to fire back, since a sailing warship's guns pointed out of her sides. But once they broke through, they'd cut the enemy fleet into pieces and fight at close range, where British gunnery was much faster and better drilled.
Collingwood's ship, the Royal Sovereign, got there first. She'd recently had her bottom freshly coppered, so she was faster than the ships behind her and pulled clear ahead, cutting in between the Spanish Santa Ana and the French Fougueux around noon. Nelson's Victory led the other column into the heart of the combined fleet shortly afterwards.
Victory Against Redoutable
Victory ended up locked side by side with the French 74-gun Redoutable, under Captain Jean-Jacques Lucas. Lucas had drilled his crew hard in close-quarters fighting, with musketry and hand grenades from the rigging rather than just big guns. His own report says his men threw more than 200 grenades onto Victory's decks and tried to board her. Victory was much taller, so only a handful of French sailors made it up before HMS Temeraire came alongside Redoutable's other flank and tore into her.
Lucas called the slaughter on his own decks "indescribable". Out of a crew he put at 643, he reckoned around 300 were killed and over 200 badly wounded. Redoutable sank in the storm the next day. Lucas's figures come from a defeated captain's report and don't fully add up, but nobody disputes that Redoutable was wrecked.
The Shot That Killed Nelson
Nelson spent the battle pacing Victory's quarterdeck with his flag captain, Thomas Hardy, wearing his undress uniform coat with the stars of his four orders of knighthood sewn on. Some of his officers reportedly wanted him to cover them up, since they made him easy to spot. He wouldn't.
At about 1.15pm, a marksman high in Redoutable's rigging fired. The ball hit Nelson's left shoulder and knocked him to his knees. It broke two ribs, tore through his left lung, cut a major artery and lodged in his spine below the right shoulder blade. Nelson told Hardy straight away that they'd finally done for him and that his backbone was shot through.
He was carried down to the orlop deck, the lowest deck above the hold, where the ship's surgeon William Beatty was working on the wounded by lantern light. Nelson covered his face and medals with a handkerchief on the way down so the crew wouldn't see who it was and lose heart. Beatty examined him and knew there was nothing he could do.
Kiss Me, Hardy: What Nelson Really Said
Nelson lived for about three hours below decks, in terrible pain, constantly asking how the battle was going. Three men wrote accounts of those hours: Beatty, the chaplain Alexander Scott and the purser Walter Burke. Hardy came down twice. On the first visit he told Nelson that a dozen or so enemy ships had struck their colours.
On the second, Nelson asked him not to have his body thrown overboard, asked him to look after Lady Hamilton, and then asked for a kiss. Hardy knelt and kissed his cheek. Nelson said he was satisfied. Hardy then kissed him on the forehead, and Nelson asked who it was. When Hardy told him, Nelson blessed him.
The Victorians found the kiss excruciating, and a theory grew up that he'd really said "Kismet, Hardy", meaning fate. It's nonsense. At least three eyewitnesses record the kiss, and the word kismet doesn't turn up in English until around 1830, a quarter of a century later. Men kissing each other in moments of grief or emotion just wasn't seen as anything remarkable in 1805. Another later theory had him asking Hardy to kiss Emma for him, which nobody present recorded either.
His last words, by all accounts, were "Thank God I have done my duty", which he kept repeating until he couldn't speak. Beatty, who'd gone back to the other wounded, only returned just before the end. Nelson died at around 4.30pm, by which time the battle was all but won.
The Storm That Took Back the Prizes
On the day itself, the result was crushing. The British captured 17 enemy ships, the French Achille caught fire and blew up and not a single British ship was lost. Victory alone lost 57 men killed, the highest death toll of any ship in the British fleet. Overall, British casualties ran to about 1,500 killed or wounded, and the French and Spanish lost thousands more, plus thousands of prisoners.
What usually gets left out is what happened next. Nelson had known a storm was coming and wanted the fleet to anchor once the fighting was done. Hardy passed the order on, but Collingwood, now in command, disagreed and headed for Gibraltar with the damaged ships under tow. By the time he changed his mind it was too late. The storm hit with full force on 22 October and kept coming back for four days.
Battered prize ships broke their tows, drove onto the Spanish coast or simply sank. Some were deliberately scuttled. Prisoners on others overpowered their skeleton British crews and sailed them into Cádiz. A French counter-attack retook the Santa Ana. Out of 17 captured ships, only four were still in British hands when it was all over.
The Fastest Bad News in Britain
Somebody had to tell London. Collingwood gave the job to Lieutenant John Richard Lapenotière, captain of HMS Pickle, a little schooner and the smallest ship in the British fleet. Pickle left on 26 October, fought her way through the same bad weather and reached Falmouth in Cornwall on 4 November.
Lapenotière then went overland by post chaise, changing horses again and again, and covered 271 miles in 37 hours without stopping. He walked into the Admiralty in Whitehall in the early hours of 6 November, eleven days after leaving the fleet. His travel expenses came to £46 19s 1d, about half a year's pay for a lieutenant. The route he took is still known as the Trafalgar Way.
The news landed like a punch. Bells rang and windows were lit up for victory, but plenty of people were in tears. Collingwood's despatch, printed in full in the London Gazette that same day, was a celebration and an obituary at the same time.
Pickled in Brandy: Getting Nelson Home
Nelson had asked not to be buried at sea, which created a practical problem. Victory didn't carry a lead coffin. So his body was stripped, his hair cut off for Emma, and he was put into the largest cask on board, a leaguer filled with brandy. A Royal Marine stood guard over it day and night on the middle deck, and the cask had two openings so the spirit could be drained and topped up without disturbing the body.
On 24 October the sentry got the fright of his life when gas building up inside the body lifted the lid of the cask. The brandy was drawn off and replaced. Victory, badly damaged, was towed into Gibraltar, where the cask was refilled with fresh spirit on 28 October, and the brandy was changed twice more during the five-week voyage home.
You've probably heard that sailors secretly drank from the cask with straws on the way home, and that this is where the naval slang "tapping the admiral" comes from. It's a great story, and it's stuck to Nelson ever since, but none of the men who wrote about the voyage home mention anything of the sort.
When Victory reached England, Beatty carried out a proper post-mortem on 11 December. He found the body in excellent condition and finally recovered the musket ball, still with bits of gold lace and lining from Nelson's epaulette stuck to it. Beatty wore the ball in a locket on his watch chain for the rest of his life. It's now in the Royal Collection, mounted under glass in a silver locket with fragments of that gold lace. Fittingly for an age that kept odd relics of its heroes (Napoleon's own post-mortem produced a far stranger souvenir), it's quite small: about 15mm across.
Nelson was then wrapped in linen, placed in a lead coffin filled with more brandy plus camphor and myrrh, and sealed inside an outer coffin made from the mainmast of L'Orient, the French flagship he'd blown up at the Nile. One of his captains, Benjamin Hallowell, had had it made after the battle and sent it to Nelson as a present, so he'd have something to be buried in. Nelson apparently kept it propped up behind his chair in his cabin for a while.
A Funeral Like Nothing Britain Had Seen
Nelson's body lay in state in the Painted Hall at Greenwich from 5 January 1806. More than 15,000 people came to see it in three days and plenty more were turned away. On 8 January it travelled up the Thames to the Admiralty in a procession of mourning barges. The funeral itself, on 9 January, had 32 admirals, over 100 captains and an escort of nearly 8,000 soldiers. His funeral car was carved to look like Victory. The service at St Paul's lasted around four hours.
Victory's sailors had one last job. They were supposed to fold Victory's flag and lower it into the grave with their admiral. Instead, at the very end, they tore a large part of it into pieces to keep as mementoes. Those scraps still turn up at auction, and one fragment sold at Sotheby's for £297,000, almost three times its estimate.
Emma, the woman Nelson had asked the nation to care for, wasn't invited.
What Happened to Everyone After the Battle of Trafalgar
Emma Hamilton. The government simply ignored the codicil. Nelson's elder brother William got an earldom and £100,000 to build a family mansion. Emma got the house at Merton and £2,000, ran up huge debts and was arrested for debt in 1813. She sold off her Nelson mementoes, including the coat he died in, which she reportedly gave to a friend to settle a debt. She fled to Calais with Horatia to escape her creditors and died there in January 1815, aged 49, probably from liver disease. English ship captains in the harbour are said to have turned out for her funeral out of respect for Nelson.
Villeneuve. The French admiral was captured and brought to England as a prisoner, then released on parole about six months after the battle. On his way back to Paris to face Napoleon, he stopped at an inn in Rennes. On 22 April 1806 he was found dead in his room with six stab wounds to the chest. The official verdict was suicide, which hasn't stopped people wondering ever since how a man manages to stab himself six times.
The coat. Nelson's bloodstained Trafalgar coat resurfaced in the 1840s. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, bought it for £150 and gave it to the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. It's now in the National Maritime Museum, where the hole in the shoulder is still plain to see.
Victory's crew. Victory sailed into battle with 820 men aboard besides Nelson and Hardy, drawn from at least 22 nationalities, including Americans, Africans, Swiss, Brazilians, Jamaicans and even a few Frenchmen. Every man on the muster roll was due a share of the prize money, including the dead, whose shares went to their families.
Where to See the Battle of Trafalgar Today
You can still go aboard HMS Victory, in dry dock at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, and stand on the spot on the quarterdeck where Nelson fell. A plaque marks it, and another marks where he died on the orlop deck below. His coat is at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the bullet is in the Royal Collection.
Nelson is still in the crypt of St Paul's, in a black marble sarcophagus originally made for Cardinal Wolsey nearly three centuries earlier, with Collingwood buried close by. Every year, on the Sunday nearest Trafalgar Day, the cathedral holds a sea service and lays wreaths at his tomb.
And then there's the column. Nelson's Column went up in Trafalgar Square between 1840 and 1843 and stands about 169 feet tall, topped by an 18-foot sandstone statue of the admiral by Edward Hodges Baily. The bronze capital at the top was cast from melted-down cannon, and Landseer's four lions didn't arrive until 1867. From up there, Nelson faces south down Whitehall towards the Admiralty, where the news of his death arrived in the middle of the night in 1805.
Further Reading
If you want the whole battle told through the people who were actually there, from the gun crews to the surgeons, Roy Adkins' Trafalgar: The Biography of a Battle is the one to go for. It's built from letters and eyewitness accounts on both sides, and it's brilliant on what life below decks was really like.
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Sources
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