The great fleet had been gathered to cover the invasion of Britain, for which Napoleon had assembled his Grand Army near Boulogne. The British blockade and the weather combined to keep the enemy in port, except for a foray across the Atlantic by which Villeneuve hoped to draw Nelson away from the English coast. The foray failed, Villeneuve had put into Cadiz, and there he was trapped. Napoleon abandoned his invasion plans and marched his army east toward its great victory at Austerlitz. The French and Spanish fleet was now an irrelevance, but Napoleon, furious with Villeneuve, sent a replacement admiral and it seems likely that Villeneuve, knowing that he faced disgrace and eager to justify his existence before his replacement reached Cadiz, put to sea. Ostensibly he was taking the fleet to the Mediterranean, but he must have hoped he could fight the British ships blockading Cadiz, win a victory and so restore his reputation. After just a day at sea he discovered that the blockading fleet was much larger than he had thought and so turned his ships back northward in hope of escaping battle. It was already too late; Nelson was in sight and the combined fleet was doomed.
There was no Pucelle, nor a Revenant. Nelson fought Trafalgar with twenty-seven ships of the line, while the combined French and Spanish fleet had thirty-three. By day’s end seventeen of those enemy ships had struck their colors and one had been destroyed by fire, making Trafalgar the most decisive naval battle until Midway. The British lost no ships but paid, of course, the price of Nelson’s life. He was the matchless hero of the Napoleonic wars, as beloved by his men as he was feared by the enemy. He was also, of course, a famous adulterer, and his last request of his country was that Britain should look after Lady Hamilton. The granting of that request lay in the power of politicians, and politicians do not change, so Lady Hamilton died in miserable penury.
On the night after the battle a huge storm blew up and all but four of the seventeen prizes were lost. Many were being towed, but the storm was too fierce and the tows were cast off. Three of the prizes sank, two were deliberately set afire and five were wrecked. Another three captured ships, manned by prize crews too small to cope with the storm, were handed back to their original crews and sailed to safety, but they were so damaged by battle and storm that none was fit to sail again. Of the fifteen enemy ships that escaped capture in battle, four were taken by the Royal Navy and one was wrecked in the next two weeks. Many of the British ships were as badly damaged as the French or Spanish, but superb seamanship brought them all safe into port.
The Pucelle, when it raked the ship alongside the Victory, was stealing the Temeraire’s thunder. The Redoutable was commanded by a fiery Frenchman called Lucas, probably the ablest French captain at Trafalgar, who had trained his crew in a novel technique aimed solely at boarding and capturing an enemy ship. When the Victory closed on his much smaller ship he shut his gunports and massed his men on deck. His rigging was filled with marksmen who rained a dreadful fire onto the Victory, and it was one of those men who shot Nelson. Lucas virtually cleared the Victory’s upper decks of men, but just as he was assembling his crew to board the British flagship, the Temeraire sailed past and emptied her carronades into the boarders. The “Saucy” also raked Lucas’s ship which was, anyway, being pounded by the Victory’s lower-deck guns.
That finished Lucas’s fight. The Redoutable was captured, but had been so damaged by gunfire that she sank in the subsequent storm. The Victory lost 57 men dead, including Nelson, and had 102 wounded. The Redoutable, in contrast, had 22 of her 74 guns dismounted and, from a crew of 643, had 487 killed and 81 wounded. That extraordinarily high casualty rate (88%) was caused by gunnery, not musketry. Other enemy ships suffered similar high casualty rates. The Royal Sovereign’s opening broadside (double-shotted) raked the French Fougueux and killed or injured half her crew in that one blow. When the Victory, later in the battle, raked Villeneuve’s flagship, the Bucentaure, she dismounted twenty of her eighty guns and again killed or wounded half the crew.