LITMIR.BIZ

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running rigging much cut; foretop-gallant and royal yard shot away … wounded in other places; fore yard nearly shot in two, and ship pulled in several places’ – but as the smoke cleared they caught their first overview of the shambles around them. ‘We had now Been Enverloped with Smoak Nearly three Howers,’ wrote James Martin. ‘Upon this Ships [Santa Trinidada] striking the Smoak Clearing a way then we had a vew of the Hostle fleet thay were scattred a Round us in all Directions Sum Dismasted and Sum were Compleat wrecks Sum had Left of Fireng and sum ware Engagen with Redoubled furey it was all most imposeble to Distinguish to what Nation thay Belonged.’

      It was a momentary respite – ‘but a few minets to take a Peep a Round us’ – but in the midst of this chaos they could see Victory and Temeraire still ‘warmly engaged’ and, more critically, ‘the six van ships of the enemy bearing down to attack’ them. In his original memorandum Nelson had anticipated this second phase of the battle, and as separate ship-actions continued to the rear of them, Neptune, Leviathan, Conqueror and Agamemnon manoeuvred to form a rough line of defence. ‘At 3.30, opened fire on them,’ Neptune’s log continued, ‘assisted by the Leviathan and Conqueror; observed one of them to have all her masts shot away by our united fire.’

      With nearly all her own sails shot away, however, and not ‘a brace or bowline left’, Neptune was in no state to give chase when the remaining enemy abandoned their attack and escaped to southward. For another hour or so the fight continued around them in a mix of close actions and long-range duels, but for Neptune – and, at 4.30, just a quarter of an hour after she had ceased firing, Nelson himself – the battle was over. ‘Three different powers to rule the main,’ ran a popular song reflecting on the fate of the three ‘Neptunes’ that had fought at Trafalgar,

      Assumed old Neptune’s name:

      One from Gallia, one from Spain,

      And one from England came.

      The British Neptune as of yore,

      Proved master of the day;

      The Spanish Neptune is no more,

      The French one ran away.

      In the immediate aftermath of the battle, though, as carpenters and surgeons went to work with their knives and saws, corpses were flung overboard, and the news of Nelson’s death spread through the fleet, there was little temptation to triumphalism. During his last moments Nelson had repeatedly enjoined Hardy to drop anchor at the end of the day, and yet for some inexplicable reason Collingwood decided against it, condemning his scattered and dismasted fleet itself to every sailor’s nightmare of a heavy swell, a freshening wind and a perilous lee shore.

      It would have been harder to say which stuck most vividly in men’s memories of Trafalgar, the battle itself or its terrible aftermath, as the stricken members of the fleet fought for their lives and prizes against a gale that was of a piece with everything that had gone before. In spite of her damage the Neptune was actually in a better state than most to ride it out, and after taking the Royal Sovereign in tow the following day, she was deployed again on the twenty-third to counter a bold enemy attempt to recapture what it could of its lost ships.

      With the weather worsening again after a brief respite – the barometer reading that night at the Royal Observatory just south of Cádiz was the lowest ever recorded – and the shattered Combined Fleet in no state to renew a general action, anxieties in Neptune rapidly turned to their hard-won prize. From the moment they had gone into action the towering Santissima Trinidada – the largest battleship in the world – had been marked as theirs, and their first sight of her after the battle, when a prize crew under William Badcock went aboard to take possession, provided a bloody testament to the appalling destruction Neptune’s ‘beautiful firing’ had inflicted. ‘She had between 3 and 400 killed and wounded,’ Badcock told his father, ‘her Beams where coverd with Blood, Brains, and peices of Flesh, and the after part of her Decks with wounded, some without Legs and some without an Arm, what calamities War brings on.’

      As conditions grew more desperate than ever, and self-interest gave way to self-preservation, Collingwood gave the order to ‘sink, burn and destroy’ all prizes, and Badcock’s thwarted crew went to work in the dark and mountainous seas. ‘We had to tie the poor mangled wretches around their waists, or where we could,’ another of Neptune’s officers recalled, as lower gun ports were opened, holes cut in the hull, and the last of the wounded winched off, ‘and lower them into a tumbling boat, some without arms, others no legs, and lacerated all over in the most dreadful manner.’

      There were 407 taken off in the Neptune’s boats alone – a last boat went back for the ship’s cat, spotted perched on the muzzle of a gun as the Trinidada rolled helplessly in her death throes – and shortly after midnight the pride of the Spanish fleet and Neptune’s prize-money went to the bottom. ‘I am afraid this brilliant Action will not put much money in my pocket,’ wrote Fremantle – unusually benign for him, given that he had nothing more tangible to show for Trafalgar than the Trinidada’s pug dog (the cat had gone to Ajax),

      but I think much may arise out of it ultimately. This last Week has been a scene of Anxiety and fatigue beyond any I ever experienced … I am at present towing the Victory and the Admiral has just made the signal for me to go with her to Gibraltar … We have ten men killed and 37 Wounded, which is very trifling when compared to some of the other Ships, however we alone have certainly the whole credit of taking the Santissima Trinidada, who struck to us alone. Adml. Villeneuve was with me over two days, I found him a very pleasant and Gentlemanlike man, the poor man was very low! … This fatigue and employment has entirely driven away the bile and if poor Nelson had not been among the slain I should be most completely satisfied.

      His letter is dated ‘off Cadiz the 28th Oct. 1805’. He was right to be satisfied. By any other measure than a butcher’s bill the Neptune had acquitted herself heroically. ‘7 November,’ reads the ship’s log ten days later, as they made passage for Gibraltar: ‘Captain Fremantle read a letter of thanks from Vice Admiral Collingwood to all officers & men belonging to the Fleet for their conduct on the 21st Octo. Performed Divine Service & returned thanks to the Almighty God for the victory gained on the day.’ Frank Hastings would have done well to have forgotten his father’s atheism and joined in. At the age of just eleven he had survived the storm of the century and the greatest battle ever fought under sail. The next time – twenty-two years later at Navarino – there would be an action of similar proportions, his brilliance and daring would have gone a long way towards provoking it.

      III

      One of the great disappointments of Hastings’s story is that there is neither a portrait of the unusually small, fair-haired lad who had fought at Trafalgar, nor any surviving account from him of his part in the battle. It is clear from the Fremantle correspondence that Frank wrote an indignant protest at being sent below, but it would seem likely that his disappointed father destroyed that along with all his other letters in the aftermath of the Kangaroo incident, reducing his boy at one embittered stroke to a silent and anonymous role in all the great dramas of his early life.

      There is an unusually rich and varied archive to fill the gaps – captains’ letters, testimonials, Admiralty minutes, ships’ logs, tailors’ bills – but nothing quite makes up for the absence of Frank’s own voice. It is easy enough to follow the external outline of his career over the next six years, but the formative steps that operated on his genetic inheritance to transform him from the small frightened boy on the quarterdeck of Neptune into the commander of the Kangaroo remain frustratingly, elusively, out of reach.

      By the time one hears his own voice, the movement and rhythms of a man-of-war, the mouldering damp and discomfort, the proximity of death and violence, the chronic sleeplessness and brutal intimacy that were the universal experience of any young officer were so much a part of his nature that they pass unnoticed. In the youthful letters of a Peel or Goodenough there is a vivid sense of what it was like to be a boy at sea, but when Hastings finally emerges from his midshipman’s chrysalis it is

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