Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero. Adam Nicolson

who are so free

      As the sons of the waves?

      Half the people who sang that were either pressed men or miscreants sent on board as part of a quota from each county, and a sixth of the entire fleet would desert or attempt to desert in the coming year (an average kept up throughout the Napoleonic war). Their average age was under 22. But the power of the British self-image as free men was such that in all probability these men believed what they sang: theirs was an honourable condition of freedom and order.

      This profound shipboard orderliness was no chance effect. The ship itself was to be a model of order. Sailmakers were to see that sails were dry when they went into store, to make sure they were aired and to secure them from ‘drips, damps and vermin as much as possible.’ Proper sentinels were to be posted ‘to prevent people’s easing themselves in the hold or throwing anything there that may occasion nastiness.’ Rather than order, the prevention of disorder was the essence of naval life. Written Admiralty instructions required the boatswain and his mates on each ship ‘to be diligent…and see…that the working of the ship be performed with as little noise and confusion as possible.’ The ship, in fact, is to be worked in silence or near-silence. The repeating of orders was thought to be a symptom of slightly inadequate management.

      In a world where the orderliness of things seems so close to disorder and disintegration, an almost dance-like form of behaviour, in which the set moves are made with some grace and precision, was a kind of bulwark against chaos, a guarantee of who you were. On these ships, theatricality of language and dress was more than mere display: it was a mark of civility and order, of a distance from the anarchic mob, of precisely the values for which the war against revolutionary-cum-imperial France was being fought. ‘Even a momentary dereliction of forms,’ one ship’s chaplain wrote, ‘might prove fatal to the general interest.’ St Vincent had insisted that his captains should remain aloof from their men and even from their brother officers. The idea of a captain eating dinner with his lieutenants appalled him. Distance was a method of command. It is the same instinct for order which lies, for example, behind an instruction issued by Lord St Vincent to the Mediterranean fleet in July 1796. The admiral wasn’t going to have any hint of casual drawing-room manners, nor the wit of elegant society, about his fleet or flagship:

      The admiral having observed a flippancy in the behaviour of officers when coming upon the Victory’s quarterdeck and sometimes in receiving orders from a superior officer and that they do not pull off their hats and some not even touching them, it is his positive directions that any officer who shall in future so far forget this essential duty of respect and subordination be admonished publically; and he expects the officers of the Victory will set the example by taking their hats off on such occasions and not touching them with an air of negligence.

      St Vincent was insistent that midshipmen should have a uniform ‘which distinguish their class to be in the rank of gentleman, and give them better credit and figure in executing the commands of their superior officers.’ Decks were to be swept at least twice a day, the dirt thrown overboard, men to change their linen twice a week, to wash frequently, to make sure the heads were clean every morning and evening. The ship was to appear ‘clean and neat from without board.’ These orders, written in order books, were to be kept on the quarterdeck and open to inspection ‘of every person belonging to the ship’, sometimes in a canvas case.

      Filthy language, the solid staple of life between decks, was nevertheless not to be used within the hearing of officers. ‘There is a word which only comes from the mouths of hardened blackguards,’ wrote the extremely cleanminded Captain Riou on the Amazon in 1799, ‘that will not be permitted to pass with impunity.’ What that word was can only be guessed at but certainly Captain Griffiths on the London in 1795 thought “‘Bugger” a horrid expression disgraceful to a British seaman, a scandalous and infamous word.’ Not as scandalous as the act itself, which seems to have been committed rarely, and only then down in the unlit spaces in the depths of the ship, on the cable tier, where love, lust or dominance could have its way with least chance of disturbance.

      The essence of the order was of course vigilance, and the roots of vigilance reached far down into the souls of the officers themselves. Officers and men lived, critically, on either side of a moral watershed: an officer’s self-control was the source of the discipline which he then imposed on the men. The state of a ship and its company was a test of the officer’s inner, moral qualities and each ship needed to be, in effect, a diagram of that highly regulated state. It was a difference which meant that the violence done by officers to men was seen as almost unequivocally good; and violence done by men to officers just as unequivocally bad. A man’s duty was to obey, an officer’s to be right and so, as an aspect of nothing but logic, a man’s failure was a cause for punishment and an officer’s a cause for dishonour.

      Every aspect of the ship was to conform to this image of order. The stores were to be stored ‘with economical exactness.’ No excuse would be admitted for stores ‘not being neatly arranged and ready to hand.’ The officer of the watch was

      to be careful that the sails are at all times well hoisted, reefs repaired if required, sheets home, yards braced, trusses, weather braces and bowlines attended to, and the sails in every respect as properly set as if the ship was in a chase.

      ’Minute attention’, ‘her exact place’, ‘a uniform system of discipline’: every phrase reinforced the sense that not only was the ship a fighting machine but a microcosm of rational civilisation, surviving in and threatened by a chaotic and hostile world, a zone of chaos to which the ship’s company naturally belonged. The terror with which mutiny was viewed, and with which the mildest whisper of mutinous thought was received, was a measure of the tightness with which the line of order was drawn. For the first lieutenant, in effect on test for promotion to captain, the demands of the system could not be more absolute:

      It is impossible he can be too minute in these particulars of his duty. He ought to know everything, see everything and have to do with everything that is to be known, seen or done in the ship.

      He was, in other words, to be Enlightenment, Virgilian man, the representative of civilisation, entirely aware, entirely informed, entirely in control and as a result entirely admirable. From the cleanness and regularity of his heart and mind would ‘follow credit and comfort to a well disposed ship’s company.’ There were some deeply traditional aspects to this. Buried deep within the 1805 conception of the naval officer was a Roman and stoical image of distilled order, of an applied and balanced rationality which both constituted and oiled the fleet system itself. A fleet was an act of English civility. Its orderliness was its virtue, rationality its fuel, clarity its purpose, and in those qualities, the English had long congratulated themselves that they were different from foreigners. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, a thrilling discovery was reported in London:

      strange and most cruell Whippes which the Spaniards had prepared to whippe and torment English men and women: which were found and taken at the overthrow of certain of the Spanish Shippes.

      The implication, of course, is that no such violence would be natural to an Englishman. No, the English were honest, plucky little fighters against wicked European tyrants and many elements of what would come to be seen as the Nelson persona were in fact utterly conventional parts of this English naval self-image. A rough broadsheet song described the virtues of Rear-Admiral Richard Carter, killed against the Dutch at la Hogue in 1692:

      His virtue was not rugged, like the waves,

      Nor did he treat his sailors as his slaves:

      But courteous, easy of access, and free,

      His looks not tempered with severity.

      Change the idiom slightly and those are precisely the terms in which Nelson was described a century later.

      Needless to say, though, this straining for order, for the idea of the beautiful machine was founded on an overriding sense of anxiety. Naval order was little more than a thin and tense veneer laid over something that was on the boundaries of the chaotic. Rationality was merely a dreamed-of haven in all the oceans of contingency. Order, it turns out, was in many ways little more than a rationalisation of chaos,