NELSON'S QUILL PEN | Christie's

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THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR by Andrew Roberts Men today can scarcely comprehend the sheer horror of what it was like to fight in a Napoleonic War sea-fight such as the battle of Trafalgar. For hours upon end, huge guns firing 18-, 24- and 32- pound iron cannonballs, or up to 500 pieces of grapeshot, at ranges sometimes as low as point-blank, dealt gory destruction to the packed ranks of highly exposed sailors and marines. The wooden hulls of early 19th- century warships were not only incapable of protecting the men toiling inside them, but when hit they sent huge shards of wood and sharp splinters flying around the cramped decks at high velocity, maiming, blinding and skewering the inhabitants. On-board fires and gunpowder explosions were ever-present hazards, as was drowning in an age when few seamen could swim. Yet for all the terror and misery, the battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 won everlasting glory for the British sailors and marines who took part, and established the 'Immortal Memory' of their commander, Admiral Lord Nelson. For on that bright autumn afternoon near the Straits of Gibraltar, they achieved something that had not happened since the Spanish Armada 317 years earlier, and was not to recur until the Battle of Britain 135 years later: the salvation of Britain from invasion. Though they could not have known it at the time, they also helped seal the fate of the Emperor Napoleon, made firm the foundations of a vast British Empire, and established the unquestioned global maritime dominance of the Royal Navy for over one hundred years. The lightning military successes that Napoleon Bonaparte had achieved since becoming commander of the French armies in Italy in 1796 had led him to be appointed in October 1797 as commander of 'The Army of England', an invasion force that was hoped would crush Britain militarily and impose revolutionary republicanism here, by use of the guillotine if necessary. As Napoleon later put it, he planned to 'Invade, enter London, wreck the shipyards and demolish the arsenals of Portsmouth and Plymouth.' This fear was an ever-present one for Britons for eight years, until Trafalgar completely dispelled it. By August 1803 Napoleon had assembled enormous camps and flotillas of invasion barges at Boulogne and along the Scheldt estuary, and in December 1804 he crowned himself emperor of the French, underlining his unlimited imperial ambitions. Although he despised Britain as 'a nation of shopkeepers', Napoleon knew that he needed more than simply a favourable north-westerly breeze in order to invade. The Royal Navy at that time was a superb fighting force, well-officered with high morale, and well provided for by a ministry under a prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, who understood that our sovereign independence ultimately depended upon it. In August 1805 Napoleon therefore broke camp at Boulogne to march eastwards to destroy Britain's allies, the Austrians and Russians, in order to isolate Britain, destroy her trade and then return for a final reckoning. In the event his lightning sixteen-week campaign did indeed destroy the Third Coalition at the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz, but by then Nelson had wrecked forever his dream of invading Britain. Horatio Nelson had no doubts that a full-scale battle between his fleet and the Combined Fleet of France and Spain would lead to the 'annihilation' of the enemy, the only outcome that Britain would regard as acceptable from such a long-established popular naval hero as him. Yet he despaired of the opportunity to fight such an engagement since, bottled up in Cadiz by his blockade, it seemed as though the Combined Fleet would never give him his chance. Then on 19 October the enemy fleet, under orders from Napoleon to support an attack on Italy, suddenly left Cadiz and attempted to get through the Straits of Gibraltar. After two days of giving chase, at 5.50am on 21 October the ship-of-the-line Achille, made the signal 'Have discovered a strange fleet'. Twenty minutes later Nelson signalled the fleet to 'Form order of sailing in two columns.' This was a tactic he had outlined to his captains during the blockade. It was not until 11.48am that he ordered hoisted the famous and inspiring signal: 'England expects that every man will do his duty'. In fact England expected much more than simply that; she expected Nelson's fleet -- even though at 27 ships it was smaller than the enemy's at 33 -- utterly to destroy Napoleon's plans ever to be able to invade the British Isles. Nelson was very conscious of the fact that nothing less would do, promising the First Lord of the Admiralty back in London that he might rely upon his 'every exertion ... that as an enemy's fleet they may be annihilated'. At 12.15pm Nelson signalled the fleet: 'Engage the enemy more closely'. By then Nelson's flagship HMS Victory, leading the northern column, had come under fire at long range, which closed drastically as she sailed -- agonisingly slowly due to the weak wind -- towards the French ships Neptune, Bucentaure and Redoutable. The brutality of a sea-battle in the age of sail cannot really be gauged even from excellent authors such as C.S. Forester or Patrick O'Brian, or from fine movies such as 'Master and Commander'. One has to turn to the eye-witness accounts of survivors such as Lieutenant Paul Harris Nicolas, a young Royal Marine aboard HMS Belleisle, for example, who left an account of what it felt like to receive the opening bombardment as his ship neared the enemy line: 'The shot began to pass over us and gave us an intimation of what we should in a few minutes undergo. A shriek soon followed -- a cry of agony was produced by the next shot -- and the loss of the head of a poor recruit was the effect of the proceeding, and as we advanced, destruction rapidly increased. My eyes were horror struck at the bloody corpses around me, and my ears rang with the shrieks of the wounded and the moans of the dying' [and for Nicolas's watercolour depicting the battered fleet at Trafalgar see lot 49]. Tubs of cinders and sand were provided for when the decks became slippery with blood, and the floors of the surgeons' rooms of ships were habitually painted red to hide the sheer quantities of gore that poured onto them. One account refers to the enemy bombardment 'strewing the ground with the victims of its wrath: only, in our case, the scene was rendered more horrible than that, by the presence of torrents of blood which dyed our decks'. The average age of the British serviceman at Trafalgar was 22. Robert Sands, a young powder-monkey from Rochester in Kent who was serving in HMS Temeraire during the fighting, recalled how 'We had to leave our quarters to get breath. The smoke suffocated us. Our after-magazine screens took fire and burnt the lieutenant of marines badly. I had just left there when the explosion took place. The men inside the screens were burnt to death. Then I had to go to the fore magazine for my powder whilst the Victory engaged the Redoubtable on the starboard side.' After having witnessed the horror of his shipmates being incinerated by an explosion in the Temeraire's powder magazine, this seventeen year old lad -- named 'boy, third class' on the muster roll -- calmly carried on his duties elsewhere on the ship. Heroism like that was utterly commonplace that day. But for every British casualty -- 449 killed and 1241 wounded -- the French and Spanish are estimated to have lost perhaps ten times those numbers. When a British midshipman boarded the Spanish flagship, the 120-gun Santissima Trinidad, he found 'She had between three and four hundred killed and wounded, her beams were covered in blood, brains and pieces of flesh, and the after part of her decks with wounded, some without legs and some without an arm; what calamities war brings on, and what a number of lives were put an end to on the 21st'. Yet Trafalgar also put an end to the threat of foreign invasion for over a century, until the Kaiser attempted to capture the Channel ports in 1914. The nodal points around the globe that Britain was awarded by the Treaty of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars ended allowed her to construct the necessary trading and communications connections to make the British Empire a world force. By 1810 the Royal Navy had grown to no fewer than 625 ships in commission, over a hundred of them ships of the line. It employed 142,098 seamen and marines and was larger than the three next largest navies in the world combined. With the power and prestige that the Navy exhibited throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries went a justifiable sense of pride. Nelson saved this country from the ravages of a foreign invasion. As HMS Neptune's captain, Thomas Fremantle, told his crew just as the battle of Trafalgar began, the fate of England 'Hung upon a Balance and their Happiness Depended upon us and their Safety also Happy the Man who Boldly Venture his Life in such a Cause if he should Survive the Battle how Sweet will be the Recollection and if he fall Covered with Glory and Honour and Mourned by a Grateful Country.' (A.R.)

NELSON'S QUILL PEN

Details

NELSON'S QUILL PEN

A trimmed goose quill pen, evidence of ink stains to nib -- 8in. (20cm.) long; contained within a modern wooden storage tube. (Nib cut extended slightly up the quill, traces of ink to upper quill, abrasion to single sided feathers)

Together with a contemporary affadivit This pen was taken by Major Wright out of Lord Nelsons writing Desk on the 2nd of Novr 1805 in the presence of capt Hardy of the Victory who desired him to keep it as being the pen with which his Lordship had written for the last time in the morn[ing] of the action. It was lying beside an unfinished le[tter to] Lady Hamilton.
2nd Nov 1805 R.W.

On verso: Note by the son of Major Wright who presented the pen to Robert Mayne Esquire from whom I afterwards recieved it. G.S.
Edinburgh 1845 (The affidavit torn away lower right corner and laid down on thin paper, docketed on the verso in the hand of G.S.)

And a commemorative print of Nelson at his writing box prior to battle, published by R. Turner and P & D Cobrington & Co, 1854 -- 23 x 18in. (58.5 x 46cm.) Moulded gilt-painted armorial frame. (3)

Provenance

Major Wright, gift from Capt. Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy.
Robert Mayne Esquire, gift from R. Wright.
Purchased 'G.S.' Edinburgh, 1845.
Purchased from Asprey & Garrard by the present vendor.

Special notice

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Lot Essay

AN IMPORTANT SURVIVAL FROM NELSON'S DESK ON VICTORY, POSSIBLY THE PEN THAT WROTE HIS LAST LETTER BEFORE THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR.

The most likely candidate for the Major Wright referred to in the affidavit is one Major Robert Wright of the Royal Artillery, then stationed at the Gibraltar garrison. The Victory limped into Gibraltar on 29 October (for an emergency refit) with Nelson's body, pickled in a cask of brandy and lashed to the main mast. Hardy was concerned to effect repairs speedily at Gibraltar so he could return Nelson's body to England, and, by the afternoon of 2 November, Victory and Belleisle were able to set sail for home.

For Nelson's writing box from the Victory, see the exhibition catalogue Nelson and Napoléon, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 2005, pp.208-9, no.239.

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