CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

NOVEMBER 1911.

1 THE MOST FAMOUS FIGHTING SHIP IN HISTORY

NELSON'S flagship AT TRAFALGAR.

BY W. H. FITCHETT.

MORE than a century ago-on December 4, 1805, to be exacta sorely battered, but still stately, battleship came slowly up the Solent and dropped anchor at Spithead. Her rigging was knotted, her sails torn, her topmasts gone; there were dark stains of blood on her decks: her sides were torn and scarred with shot, and, in some cases, the shot was yet showing under the splintered wood. It was the Victory, Nelson's flagship, coming into port after Trafalgar. The glory of the greatest naval victory ever won lay upon her; but her flag flew half-mast -a gesture of distress. She had carried that mute symbol of grief ever since the day of battle, for Nelson was dead; and not even victory was a quite adequate compensation for that loss.

And anyone who to-day desires to visit the famous ship as she lies at her moorings in Portsmouth Harbour could hardly do better than take the course she took, with her dead Admiral on board, up the Solent, that historic strip of water with its wooded shores and crowded memories. For there is perhaps no other patch of sea under any sky charged with such associations, or that offers quite the same combination of busy sea-life, old and new. Across the Solent, like antique beads stretched on a thread, is a line of round chequer-patterned forts with quaint names The Spit,' The Horse,' 'No Man's,' &c. These ancient forts are useless, but they are still picturesque. The great water-lane is full of sea-life-leaning yachts with their white sails, coasting craft of every size and rig, brown-sailed fishing-boats, with here and there an ocean tramp, its paint bleached by tropical suns and seas. There are fighting ships. 37

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too, of all types coming and going; torpedo-boats, low, black, deadly-looking-tiny sea-gnats, but of amazing stinging power; battleships, with tripod masts; drab-coloured cruisers, &c.

The gap into Portsmouth Harbour, when at last it comes into sight, is perilously narrow. How the bluff three-deckers of a century ago, with their round bows, their apple-shaped hulls, and towering piles of canvas, could get through that narrow gap in all weathers—and before tugs were invented-is still a puzzle. The long war with France certainly bred fine seamen.

By this time the visitor catches a glimpse of a great ship, unlike anything the Solent has yet offered to his gaze, lying moored in Portsmouth Harbour. Her tall masts-the jack flying from the mizzen-her triple lines of ports, the stately hull, the high proud stem identify her. This is the Victory, the most famous fighting ship in all history! She has lain there since 1812, and is still in commission, for she carries the flag of the Naval Commander-in-Chief. Every year, as October 21 comes round, a wreath of laurel adorns each mast-head. In 1869, indeed, the British Admiralty, suddenly fallen bankrupt of historical imagination, discovered it had no longer any useful office for the ship on which Nelson died; and for twenty-two distressful years 1869-1891 the Victory lay neglected, unhonoured, forgotten. She might have been broken up for firewood, or sold as old timber. But in 1891 she was restored to her dignity as flagship, and still from her moorings she appeals, as no other ship that floats, or ever floated-save perhaps the Mayflower-could appeal, to the English-speaking

race.

In her active days the Victory bore the reputation of being the fastest battleship ever built; and as she lies to-day in the quiet Portsmouth waters her lines still whisper of speed. The typical British three-decker of the Revolutionary Wars resembled -except in the matter of angles-a brick on edge. She was high, stumpy, short-bodied, square-sterned. Her bows were modelled on the contours of a pumpkin. She was as unsinkable, perhaps, as a corked bottle, and about as weatherly. But the lines of the Victory wear a certain aspect of grace. Her proportions are harmonious. Her hull rounds out for a little distance above the water-line and then tumbles home to the upper deck; and this made her a steady ship. Her stem is high, haughty, menacing; and, as she bore down, with leaning decks, upon

some hostile line of battle, with her sky-climbing piles of white canvas above and her three curving lines of guns below, she must have worn a very formidable aspect.

The Victory has a long and honourable ancestry. A ship carrying her name has been on the British Navy List ever since 1570, and if any one could tell, in adequate prose, the tale stretching through three centuries, of that line of hard-fighting, storm-beaten ships, the story would make surprisingly good reading. The immediate predecessor of Nelson's Victory carried 110 guns, and was counted the finest ship in in the service. She was the flagship of Admiral Balchen, and in 1744 was caught by a tremendous gale in the chops of the Channel, disappeared, with torn canvas and slanting masts, beyond the sky-line, and was never heard of again. She is believed to have run on the Casquets; but no trace of the ill-fated ship was ever discovered, and of her crew of 1000 men not one survived.

The present Victory was launched from Chatham Dockyard in 1765, so that she has been afloat for nearly a century and a half. She is a little ship, measured by the scale of modern battleships. Her length from figure-head to taffrail is 226 feet; the actual length of keel is only 151 feet. She has an extreme beam of fifty-two feet, and a displacement of 2162 tons. These are, for a ship which has played so famous a part in sea-history, surprisingly modest dimensions. The first Dreadnought had a length of 490 feet-more than double the length of the Victoryand a displacement of 17,900 tons. The later Dreadnoughts-of the Lion class-are nearly three times as long as the Victory— 660 feet with a displacement of over 26,000 tons, and they have engines of 70,000 horse-power, capable of driving the vast steel-cased hull through the sea at the rate of thirty knots an hour. Compared with monsters of this scale, the Victory is only a toy. The bigger Dreadnoughts have more than ten times her tonnage. The latest Cunarder will be more than 900 feet in length-four times, that is, the length of the Victory, and twenty times her tonnage.

But the build and equipment of the Victory may help us to realise how close, and how deadly, was the fighting in the naval battles of Nelson's day. Here is a ship of a little over 2000 tons; her main gun-deck has a length of only 186 feet; there are wide open ports in her wooden sides. She is in effect a floating box of very moderate dimensions, with sides of planks.

But she carried a crew of over 1000 men, and on her triple gun-decks were crowded 104 guns. The decks are low, and the huge beams make them lower still. A man of average height can hardly stand upright without knocking his head against the beams that carry the deck above.

It is easy to picture the scene such a ship must have presented in battle: the curving lines of guns, each with its half-naked crew, and its rough equipment of rope; the officers standing, sword in hand, behind each battery; the running powder monkeys, the smoke, the shouts, the roar of the broadsides, the backward leap of the great guns, the stream of the wounded. And all this crowded, deck above deck, into a wooden box a little over 200 feet long, only fifty-two feet broad, with a depth of twenty-one feet! What an interval parts the Victory from, say, a Dreadnought, with its vast bulk, its 10-inch steel armour, its huge guns behind their metal hoods, its captain in a shot-proof conning-tower. At Trafalgar the Victory had two French line of battleships and the biggest Spaniard-the Santa Trinidada-firing on her for hours with guns almost touching— in the case of the Redoutable, with guns actually touching— her sides! It is a wonder that any of her crew survived, or that she herself floated.

The famous ship lying in Portsmouth Harbour has a picturesque history. After she was launched she lay at her moorings uncommissioned, and without vocation or use, for thirteen years. It seemed as if she had been built by mistake. But in 1778 war with France was imminent, and English dockyards became busy. Then the Victory was remembered, and Admiral Keppel hoisted his flag on her as Commander of the Channel Fleet. She had a stormy commission of five years, though the tedious battle methods of that period added no particular splendour to the British flag. The Victory took part in the manœuvres between Keppel and D'Orvilliers off Ushant in 1778. In that engagement Keppel, it is curious to note, drew off from exactly such a combination of French and Spanish fleets outside Cadiz as that which twenty-seven years later Nelson, in the same waters, fought and destroyed at Trafalgar. In the splutter of battle under Keppel the Victory had, at one moment, no less than six French ships firing on her; but French shooting at that period was of very poor quality, and the British ship lost only eleven killed and twenty-four wounded.

Sir Charles Hardy hoisted his flag on the Victory in 1779, and

he had an even less satisfactory brush with the French off the Scilly Islands than Keppel had outside Cadiz, finally drawing off and making sail for Spithead; this, it is gravely recorded, being the only time the Victory showed her stern to a French line of battle.

It is curious to stand to-day on the quarter-deck of the historic ship and call up a picture of all the sea captains whose feet have trodden its planks. Good fighting men, no doubt, all of them, but without any special genius for leadership, or hampered by vicious tactical theories; the Victory certainly won no special fame under their flags. British seamen had hardly mastered the secret, which Rodney tried to teach them, of making a naval action decisive.

The Victory carried, in turn, Geary's flag and Darby's; then she was Hyde Parker's flagship in the North Sea, and Kempenfelt's the brave Kempenfelt' of Cowper's ballad-in the Channel. In December 1781, Kempenfelt fought a brilliant little action off Ushant, in which he repeated-on a small scaleRodney's tactics at the Battle of the Saints. He broke through the enemy's line, sank four frigates, and captured one whole division of the convoy the Frenchmen were guarding. A little over seven months later-in August 1782-the Royal George, on which Kempenfelt had now hoisted his flag, sank at her moorings at Spithead, and 900 of her crew perished. The Victory was moored only a short distance off, and her boats saved many of the ill-fated flagship's crew.

Lord Howe-the Black Dick' of forecastle vernacularnext hoisted his flag on the Victory, and in a pottering, semiaccidental fashion, relieved the British garrison of Gibraltar, at that moment hard pressed by the combined French and Spanish fleets. In February 1783 the Victory was paid off. She had completed her second commission of five years, during which, if she had taken part in no brilliant victories, she had won the reputation of being the fastest three-decker afloat. She was Hood's flagship in 1790, and during his commission took part in the occupation of Toulon; she was thus one of the ships on which Bonaparte trained his guns when he first broke into history as an artillery officer.

In the stormy days that followed, the Victory naturally saw much service. Nelson, then commanding the Agamemnon, first came into touch at the siege of Calvi with the ship in which he was to win his most famous victory. Jervis, in the