Men of Honour - Adam Nicolson

We’ve been on the land, we’ve been in the air – now it’s time to put to sea. For about seven hours on the morning of October 21st 1805, in an area scarcely a mile and a half long by half a mile wide nearly 75 ships of the line from three navies – British, French and Spanish - battered at each other near Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast.
In a battle where a three-decker could kill 230 men in a little over a minute and put almost 15 tons of iron into opponents, there was always going to be a huge butcher’s bill. Nelson himself considered that no captain could do much wrong by putting his ship broadside to broadside with another and hammering away until someone gave in. In brute terms, Trafalgar was a slugging match, no more and no less. Whoever could kill the most men the fastest was the winner; it was as simple as that.
Appropriately enough for a book dealing with sea warfare in the age of sail, Nicolson moves rather like one of the ships he describes. Lumbering, unwieldy, a lot of smoke and thunder but not actually getting anywhere fast….

It takes 209 pages before the first gun is fired and then in a mere (by comparison) 66 pages the battle is done, Nelson dead and Brittania triumphant. Music plays and credits roll. So, it might be fair to ask, for the previous chapters what has Nicolson actually been doing?
The answer is spending a lot of time setting the story and delving deeply into the period before comitting anything to paper. Now usually this is a benefit in such historys and indeed there is a lot of interesting detail here; how the separate navies differed in traditions, expectations and men, to the training of said men and the results of it. In terms of raw materials the French had by far the superior ship designs, the Spanish marginally better guns, but it was the British who had the best firing devices for their own weapons which, coupled with incessant training meant a 32 pounder fired every ninety seconds in the Victory and scarcely every 3 minutes in the Santissima Trinidad, the largest ship in the whole battle.
Every British officer had to be a seaman first, officer second and his station in life depended entirely upon success. Their Spanish counterparts were officers of the aristocracy first and seamen were those who obeyed commands, whilst it is cruelly generalising it but oddly accurate that the French were a plain mess. As Nicolson puts it, Trafalgar was the combination of:
“Antique Spanish stiffness; French post-revolutionary uncertainty; and British commercial, bourgeois dynamism.”

This book actually points out that by a rather simple manouver Nelson’s tactics could have been totally thrown against him with far different results. But as much as it pains me to say it, I couldn’t actually finish. A rarity for me. Others have raved about it but I for one cannot find the “brilliantly dramatic account.” spoken of by the Independent’s book critic.

Yawn. Next!