Nation’s favourite: Turner’s Fighting Temeraire can be found in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square
By Sam Willis
Struggling to breathe in mouthfuls of air rank with choking gunsmoke, hundreds of men and boys crouched low on the gun decks of His Majesty’s Ship Temeraire.
In that cramped space, where shouted orders competed with the screams of the injured, blood ran freely through a hull hewn from English oaks.
Already the sails high above were riddled with chain shot from the French warships, but it was there, on the crowded gundecks that a brutal slaughter was unfolding.
In the hellish tempest of the Battle of Trafalgar, in an act of almost suicidal valour, the Temeraire’s captain chose to draw fire away from the Victory, in which Nelson lay dying.
Soon, two vast enemy warships were lashed to the flanks of the Temeraire, a lethal barrage of fire pouring from their gunports.
Forty-seven men lost their lives on the British ship and 67 were severely injured – a terrible butcher’s bill for the surgeon working feverishly in the bowels of the vessel.
Later, the contemporary art critic John Ruskin described how the Temeraire had fought until her sides ran ‘wet with the long runlets of English blood … those pale masts that stayed themselves up against the warruin, shaking out their ensigns through the thunder, till sail and ensign dropped’.
Two centuries later, Turner’s famous painting of the Fighting Temeraire can be found in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
Every day visitors flock to see the great warship glowing in sepulchral light as she is towed to the breaker’s yard by a steam tug.
It is the nation’s favourite painting – its popularity is as much due to the melancholic subject matter as the deftness of the artist’s brushstrokes.
Yet few people know anything of life on board, or of the terrible sacrifices made by her crew.
That’s why, with new access to previously restricted archives, I decided to write a book about the Fighting Temeraire – a choice, in part, inspired by Turner’s great painting.
Although it’s one of the most iconic images of the overlapping ages of sail and steam, it amazed me that no one has ever written the full history of the ship itself.
When I started my research, I discovered the records of the Admiralty survive in amazing condition.
I used logbooks of the Temeraire and reports from her captains; maps drawn by sailors aboard; letters to fathers, wives, children and lovers; ship plans and sailing reports.
The Temeraire started life in the ancient shipyard of Chatham in 1793, costing a staggering £73,241 (£4million today).
That year Revolutionaries in France had guillotined their king, Louis XVI, in the centre of Paris. On both sides of the Channel, the hammering of shipwrights’ tools called their navies to war.
Temeraire was named after an earlier ship seized from the French.
The Temeraire’s three decks gave her a distinctive silhouette; she was easily recognised by both friend and enemy.
The three decks also gave plenty of room for the officer’s quarters, which made her suitable as a flagship.
She was in fact larger than the first-rate HMS Victory, which had been built 30 years before.
A staggering 5,000 trees were used to build her hull.
The strong, naturally curved oak that English forests grew so well formed the wine-glass shape of her hull, and the beautifully straight pines of Baltic forests provided her with deck planks and masts.
The rig was vast. The sails of the three masts, if all set, covered a staggering 6,510 sq yds of sky.
Twenty-five miles of rope held up the masts and worked the sails through 750 blocks. The masts were 205ft high.
Make no mistake, this was a ship designed to wage bloody war.
She was armed with 98 guns on three gun decks with more bristling from her quarterdeck and forecastle, not least the murderous carronades, the short but immensely powerful gun known then as the ‘smasher’ for the destruction it caused at close range.
Gunnery tactics varied, but in fleet action in the Royal Navy, and under Nelson’s command, close action was favoured.
The men would stand silent as the ship sailed towards the enemy – the silence speaking volumes of the sailors’ discipline.
This unnerved the jittery French, always so keen to fire as soon as their enemy was in range, often with little effect.
But the British scorned such tactics, as they could not deliver decisive victory. They did not want to fight off the French ships, but to capture or destroy them.
As for the layout of the ship, the officers lived at the stern – their quarters lit by the vast bank of windows.
Access to daylight itself was a privilege of rank. Seamen were restricted to peeking out of gunports and risked a soaking while doing so, whereas the officers could enjoy the view from the comfort of their mess table.
Some officers furnished their quarters lavishly.
The crew’s diet was central to their health, and significant numbers of livestock were taken aboard.
Hence, the noise of a warship was as much characterised by clucking, mooing and oinking as it was by gunfire and shouting, and the smell in some parts was farmyard.
Every week, each man was allowed 4lb of beef, 2lb of pork, 2lb of peas, 11/2lb of oatmeal, 6oz of sugar, 6oz of butter and 12oz of cheese.
Each day he was also issued with a full pound of ship’s biscuit.
This diet kept the men alive and strong, if hungry, and it was often far better fare than most people ashore could expect to receive regularly.
But it was fresh food, however, that kept the dreaded scurvy at bay – this curious disease that made gums bleed, teeth fall out, and men so weak they could not stand.
In the years that the Temeraire fought the French, the Navy started to get a grip on preventing scurvy through the regular issue of lemon juice.
The lemon juice was taken neat or with the sailor’s grog.
This was the highlight of the sailor’s day.
Twice a day, every day, the sailors were issued their tot of rum; half a pint in total, diluted with three parts of water, issued morning and evening.
If spirits were unavailable, the men received beer – a gallon each.
With so many men cooped up in one place, discipline was a constant challenge.
It was maintained through a complex and forgiving relationship between officers and men.
The majority of officers knew that to run a ship some misdemeanours had to be harshly punished. Only very rarely was mutiny sparked by punishment – usually it was over food, money or leave.
But discipline was one area where, once, the crew of the Temeraire failed – on a cold winter’s morning in 1801.
A truce had been agreed with Napoleon and the men were delighted at the prospect of going home after eight long years of war.
Their political masters, however, had other ideas.
They mistrusted Napoleon, who had taken the opportunity of peace to send a huge force of 41 ships and 12,000 men to the West Indies under the command of Jerome Bonaparte, his brother.
The Temeraire was ordered to the Caribbean, but with no hope of leave for at least a year, the men mutinied.
This was no quiet affair, a gentle negotiation with the officers behind closed doors, but a violent protest.
The mutineers took control of the ship’s discipline, threatening any who dissented from their plan with death.
One mutineer, Norman Dixon, threatened to stab the ship’s Marines when they were asleep in their hammocks if they did not lend their support to the uprising.
In the end, it took an armed coup by the officers to seize back control of their ship.
The mutineers were taken back to Portsmouth where the ringleaders were tried and hanged, or as it was reported in the Press, ‘launched into eternity’.
The Admiralty sent the Temeraire immediately back on blockade duty to keep her crew out of trouble and there, beaten by the gales of Biscay off the coast of France, and tossed like a cork in the deep Atlantic swells, the men re-found their discipline in the steady rhythms of shipboard life and gunnery drill.
By October 1805, they were fit for any challenge that faced them, and when Nelson penned his order of battle to face the combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar, the very first ship on his list – that commanded by the senior captain of the fleet, Eliab Harvey – was the Temeraire. She was ready for glory.
Harvey was cut from the same canvas as Nelson. He had joined the Navy at 13 and was a captain by 25.
He had enjoyed a glittering career and was renowned for his daring.
He was exactly the kind of captain that Nelson wanted.
Compulsive and brave (in gambling as well as war), he represented his countrymen at both the ballot box and on the gundeck, and he did so for the love of his country and his hatred of the French.
Harvey’s crew was a little under its full roster, but still 720 men and boys crammed into her dark gun-decks.
The youngest officer was Alexander Brennan, a midshipman from Dublin. He was just 12. The youngest member of the crew, however, was Richard Elliott, who was 11. There were 41 other boys aboard.
The oldest crew member was Michael Leonard, another Irishman. He was 62.
In the hellish tempest of the Battle of Trafalgar, Temeraire first took on the largest warship of the time, the giant four-decked Spanish first-rater Santisima Trinidad, before being trapped between two French ships, defending the Victory. It was an action of extraordinary courage.
‘Nothing could be finer,’ wrote the Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood to Harvey after the battle. ‘I have not words in which I can sufficiently express my admiration.’
Forty-seven of the vessel’s sailors had died in the battle, and 76 more were wounded. There was little time to record details of individual injuries in the heat of battle, but we do know that one young midshipman, 20-yearold William Pitts from London, had a leg blown off as he boarded the first French ship to surrender to the Temeraire, La Redoutable.
The French crew were so horrified that he had been injured by another French ship when they had officially surrendered, that Pitts was taken straight down to the French surgeon, past the lines of Frenchmen waiting for treatment, to have his leg amputated. Pitts died that night.
The Temeraire survived the horrific storm that followed the battle and eventually limped home.
The damage was enormous.
Every sail and yard had been destroyed; only the lower masts were standing and they had been shot through in many places; the rudder had been shot off together with the starboard ‘cat-head’, from which the starboard anchor should have been suspended.
Eight feet of her hull on the starboard side was stove in and the quarter galleries on both sides of the ship had been destroyed as she was crushed between the French ships.
But it could have been worse. At one stage, a grenade thrown from a French ship found its way onto the Temeraire’s quarterdeck and caused an explosion.
It took the quick thinking of John Toohig, the Temeraire’s master-at-arms, to prevent the fire from spreading to the magazine, which would have destroyed her.
Upon its return to England, the public flocked to see the battlescarred ship, and among their number was Joseph Mallord William Turner, who sketched the ship and its survivors.
The Temeraire captivated the artist for the next 30 years until, at the height of his powers, he completed that mournful painting of her final voyage to the breaker’s yard that we know so well, with a steam-tug pulling a ghostly leviathan, and the sun setting on the wooden walls of old England.
The Fighting Temeraire by Sam Willis is published by Quercus at £25. To order a copy at £22.50 (P&P free), call 0845 155 0720.
