Thirty-Nine

by Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The wind had come round into the south in the night, and all morning it had carried the smoke of the battle up the channel to the frigates and laid it over them.

Daniel Tull stood at the taffrail of the Amazon with the signal glass in both hands and his elbows on the rail, and looked for the Elephant, and could not find her.

He knew where she was. He had seen her go in with the line at ten o'clock, with Lord Nelson's blue flag at her fore and the whole of her side opened up as she came abreast of the Danish ships, and he had seen her anchor and settle to it as quietly as if she were at Spithead. That was south of them, a mile or more down the line. Since then the line had been firing for three hours, and the Danes had been firing back, ship and hulk and floating battery and the batteries on the shore, and all that powder had gone up into the air and the wind had taken it and brought it north. It came over the Amazon in long brown rolls, one behind the other like surf on a flat beach. When one went by you could see a little way, a masthead, a scrap of an ensign, the flash of a gun with no ship round it. Then the next one came.

North was another matter. To the north the smoke had somewhere to go, and went, and the air beyond it was as clear as glass. Tull could see the sails of the reserve at anchor some miles off, and the London among them, with Sir Hyde Parker's flag at her main. He could see her yards and the men on them if he looked. He had no need to look. Nobody was signalling to the frigates from the north.

"Anything, Mr Tull?"

"Not yet, sir. She's in the thick of it."

Captain Riou nodded and did not ask again. He was sitting on the slide of the aftermost quarterdeck carronade on the larboard side, because there was nowhere else on the quarterdeck that a man could sit, and because, Tull thought, he did not trust his legs. A splinter had taken him over the left ear about an hour before. It had come off the hammock netting when a shot from the big battery went through it, a piece of oak as long as a man's hand, and it had laid his scalp open to the bone. The surgeon's mate had come up and bound it with a strip of linen, and Riou had sent him below again before he had finished, so that one end of the linen hung down behind like the tail of a wig. The blood had come through and dried, and come through again. He had put his hat on over it. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the Trekroner.

Everybody on that deck looked at the Trekroner, sooner or later, whatever else they were doing.

It was a fort built out in the water at the mouth of the harbour, the head of the whole Danish line, low and grey, and it had been firing at the five frigates for an hour and a half without a pause that Tull had noticed. Its guns were heavier than anything the frigates had. It did not move, and it did not burn, and it did not seem to mind what was done to it. The Amazon was firing her eighteen-pounders into it as fast as they could be loaded, and the Blanche and the Alcmene astern of her were doing the same, and the Arrow and the Dart beyond them, and Tull had watched the shot strike. They struck the stone and the stone threw up a puff of dust and was still there.

That was not what they had come for. Tull knew that, because he had been in the cabin the night before.

---

He had been there to take down the signals. That was his work: master's mate, and keeper of the signal book, and when the captain wanted the book or wanted a list made of what the flags were to mean, it was Tull who came with the book and the slate. He had been in the Amazon since she was commissioned in the year ninety-nine and Riou had made him keeper of the book on the second day, because, Riou said, he wrote a hand you could read in the dark. So Tull had been there in the cabin of the Elephant the night before the battle. Not at the supper; he had waited in the boat for that. But afterwards, when the cloth was drawn and the captains came back to the table for the plan, Riou had sent for him, and he had sat in the corner behind their backs with his slate on his knee.

He had expected to be bored. He had been to councils before, under other admirals, and he knew how they went. The admiral read out the order of battle. The captains said, Aye, sir. Then they went away.

This had not been that. Lord Nelson had gone through it ship by ship. Not the order of battle only, but what each ship was there for. This ship anchors here, abreast of that Danish ship, because that Danish ship is a hulk with no masts and cannot get away, and when she is beaten this ship can veer her cable and drop down to help the next. This ship goes there because the shoal is there, and she draws less than the rest. And if a ship cannot get to her place, Lord Nelson had said, looking round the table, then let the captain take the next place he can get to, and fight there, and not wait to be told. Everyone at that table, he said, knew now what was wanted as well as he did. If the smoke was too thick to see his signals, and it would be, then let them do what they knew was wanted.

And the frigates. He had turned to Riou last, as if he had kept the best for last. The frigates were not to fight the Trekroner. No frigate could fight the Trekroner. The frigates were to go to the head of the line and be ready, and when the line had done its work and the Danish ships were silenced, then the frigates and the bomb-vessels would go where the Trekroner could no longer stop them. But until then they were to keep their station. And if a ship of the line could not reach her place at the head of the line, which God forbid, then Captain Riou would know better than anybody what to do.

Tull had written that down on the slate. Capt. R. to know what to do. He had looked at it for a long time afterwards, by the light of the lantern in the Amazon's gunroom, while the others slept. He did not know why he had written it down. It was not a signal. There was no flag for it.

In the morning, two ships of the line had gone aground on the shoal before they reached their places, and a third had never got into the channel at all. Tull had watched it happen through this same glass. The head of the line, the place opposite the Trekroner where three seventy-fours should have been, was empty water. And Riou had looked at the empty water for perhaps half a minute, and then made the signal to the frigates to follow him, and taken them into it.

So he had known what to do. That was an hour and a half ago.

---

A shot from the fort struck the Amazon forward, somewhere about the cathead, and Tull felt it come aft along the deck through his feet. Something went over the side. A man was shouting on the forecastle, not in pain, but in the voice of a man who wants a particular thing brought to him and wants it now. Then the forward guns went off together, and the ship leaned to it and came back.

"She's took that one in the bows, Mr Tull," said Ruddle.

Ruddle was the seaman at the signal halliards, a Shetlander, long in the arm and slow in the speech, who had stood by the flag-locker since the first gun with nothing to do, because nothing had been made to the frigates since Riou took them in. He had passed the time by coiling down the halliards and then coiling them down again the other way. He had a quid of tobacco in his cheek that he had not chewed for an hour, as far as Tull could see; he had forgotten it was there.

"She has."

"She'll not take many more like it."

"She'll take what she's given," Tull said, "like the rest of us," and was ashamed of it as soon as it was out, because it was the kind of thing an officer says, and he was not an officer, and Ruddle knew it. But Ruddle only nodded, as if it had been a fair answer, and went back to his coil.

"There's nothing coming, then," he said after a while. "From the Admiral."

"Which Admiral?"

Ruddle thought about it. "Either," he said.

"Nothing," said Tull. "We know what we're here for. We don't need telling."

He believed it when he said it. He had the slate in his coat pocket still, with the writing rubbed half away on the corner where it had lain against his ribs all morning. Capt. R. to know what to do. He put his hand on it through the cloth.

He put his eye to the glass again.

The smoke had a gap in it, low down on the water, and in the gap he could see the hull of a Danish ship, very close, and her ports with no guns in them and her side beaten in, and a boat pulling away from her. Then the gap closed. Above it, where the masts of the British line should be, there was only the brown, moving slowly, with the light of the sun showing through it here and there as a yellow stain.

"Mr Tull."

It was not the captain. It was Mr Quilliam, the first lieutenant, standing at his elbow, black to the eyes with powder, his voice gone to a whisper from shouting. He did not waste words.

"The London," he said. "Look at the London."

Tull turned the glass north. It took him a moment to find her, because he had his eye made up for smoke and the clear air dazzled him. Then she came into the round of the glass, sharp and small and perfectly plain, with the sun on her topsails and her flag at the main, and where there had been nothing all day, a string of colours flying out stiff in the wind.

He knew it before he had read it. He read it anyway, because that was his work: the flag that was three, and under it the flag that was nine.

He did not need the book. He opened the book.

"Thirty-nine, sir," he said. "To the fleet. Discontinue the action."

Quilliam said nothing. He stood there for a moment, and then he walked across the quarterdeck to the captain and bent down and spoke to him. Tull did not hear what he said. He saw Riou lift his head and look north. Riou had no glass. He did not need one. Anybody could see the London.

Then Riou turned his head and looked south, into the smoke.

"Mr Tull," he said. "The Elephant."

---

He tried. He would say that afterwards, to the only man who ever asked him, and it was true. He put the glass on the place where the Elephant had to be and held it there, and when the smoke thinned he searched along the gap and when it thickened he waited. He found a ship's masts, and lost them, and found them again, and they were a ship's masts with no flag at all, a Danish ship's or a British ship's, he could not tell. He found the Defiance, he thought, nearer, with Admiral Graves's flag, or a flag; and he could see that there were colours at her yards but not what they were, because the smoke went across them faster than he could read. He held the glass so hard his hands hurt.

"I can't make her out, sir. Nor her signals. The smoke's all set this way."

"Look again."

He looked again. He wanted very much to see something. He thought afterwards that if he had seen anything at all, a scrap of blue, a flag of any colour, he would have called it out and called it the Elephant, and he did not know to this day whether that would have been a lie. He did not see anything.

"No, sir. Nothing."

Riou did not answer him. The Trekroner fired, a dozen guns together, and the shot went over and through the rigging and a block came down on the deck by the wheel and lay there with a fathom of rope rove through it. The quartermaster at the wheel kicked it out of the way without looking down.

There was a thing that Tull had heard said at Lord Nelson's table, while the port went round, by one of the captains. A good-humoured thing, said to make the others laugh, about Sir Hyde Parker and how he had liked his dinner at Yarmouth. Lord Nelson had not laughed. He had said, quite quietly, that Sir Hyde was commander-in-chief of that fleet, and the gentlemen would remember it. And the captain who had spoken had gone red and said, Yes, my lord. Tull had not thought about it since. He thought about it now.

Riou stood up.

He did it carefully, with one hand on the breech of the carronade. When he was up he stood quite straight and looked about him, at the guns and the men at the guns, and at the Blanche astern with her foretopsail in rags, and then north once more at the London, small and bright in the sun, where her signal had been answered by now, Tull supposed, in a dozen ships, though not here. Not yet. The signal had been flying perhaps five minutes.

"What will Nelson think of us?" Riou said.

He did not say it to anybody. Quilliam was beside him and the master was a few feet off, and Tull himself not ten feet from him with the glass, and none of them answered, because it was not a question that wanted an answer. He said it in the voice a man uses who has found a thing broken that he will have to explain.

Then he said, "Mr Tull, acknowledge. Mr Quilliam, we will haul off. Make the signal to the frigates to follow me."

---

Tull bent the flags on himself. Ruddle should have done it, but Ruddle was sitting against the bulwark with his hands in his lap and a look on his face of great patience, as if he were waiting for a coach, and there was nothing to be done for him. So Tull did it. Acknowledge, and the number for the frigates, and the signal to haul off in succession. His hands knew the work. The flags went up into the smoke and blew out over his head toward the north, where Sir Hyde Parker might see them or might not.

He looked aft as he made the halliard fast. The Blanche had seen it. Her people were already at her braces.

The Amazon came round slowly. She had to: there was the shoal to the east of them, and the line of the battle to the south, and the only open water was the way they had come in. So she had to bring the wind on her quarter and then astern of her and stand away, and to do that she had to turn, and for the time it took her to turn she would show the Trekroner her stern.

Everybody on the quarterdeck knew that. Nobody said it.

The order went forward and the topmen went up, those that were left. On the deck the waisters and the marines tailed on to the braces. Tull watched the main-yard begin to come round, slowly, groaning in its slings, the men walking aft along the deck with the brace over their shoulders, their heads down, the sergeant of marines walking with them and calling the time. The fore-yard came round. The ship began to pay off. He felt her heel a little as the wind came into the sails from the new side.

The Trekroner saw it too. There were officers in that fort with glasses as good as his own.

The guns of the fort had been firing all day as fast as they could, and Tull had thought that was as fast as guns could fire. He was wrong. When the Amazon began to turn, it was as if the whole face of the fort opened at once. He did not hear the shot strike, there was too much noise, but he saw the men on the main-brace go down. Not one man, but a length of them, as if the rope itself had been cut and they had fallen with it. The brace ran out. The sergeant was on his knees. Others came and took hold of the brace and walked aft with it again.

And the captain's clerk, who had come up from below with a paper in his hand because there was a return to be signed, whatever was happening on deck, and who had been standing at Riou's side waiting for him to sign it, was not standing there any longer. Tull did not see the shot that did it. He saw the paper. It went up into the air and the wind took it, and it went away over the taffrail into the smoke, turning over and over like a gull.

Riou looked down at the deck where his clerk was. He looked for a moment only. Then he looked up again at the men on the main-brace, and the men lying under it, and the men stepping over them to take the rope.

He walked to the break of the quarterdeck. He had taken off his hat at some time, Tull did not see when, and the bandage showed with the blood through it, and the loose end blowing.

"Come then, my boys," he said, loud enough to be heard on the main-deck below, "let us all die together."

He said it cheerfully. That was what Tull remembered. Not the words. A good many men heard the words, and wrote them down afterwards, and they were printed. What none of them wrote was that he said it the way a man says, Come on, then, it's only rain.

The men at the brace laughed. Some of them. They walked the yard round.

Riou went back to the carronade and sat down on it again, with his hands on his knees, as he had sat all morning, and looked at the Trekroner.

---

Tull went back to the taffrail. It was his place, and he had his signals flying, and the Blanche and the Alcmene to watch for answers, and he did not know what else to do. He put the glass on the Blanche. She was coming round in the Amazon's wake, bravely enough, her yards going round together. He could see her captain on her quarterdeck. He could see the shot from the fort striking the water round her, short and over.

Behind him the Trekroner fired again.

He felt it before he understood it, the way you feel a sea strike the counter. A shock in the deck, and a sound like a door slammed in a stone house, and something hot past his cheek. When he turned round the quarterdeck had changed shape. The aftermost carronade on the larboard side, the one the captain had been sitting on, was lying over on its slide. The wheel was standing, and the quartermaster at it, holding the spokes, with his mouth open. Mr Quilliam was on his hands and knees by the binnacle, getting up.

The captain was not standing anywhere. Tull looked for him for a moment, the way he had looked for the Elephant, among things that would not make sense; and then he did not look any longer.

Quilliam got to his feet. He looked at the place where the captain had been, and his face did not change at all, because it could not, Tull thought: there was too much powder on it. Then he looked up at the sails.

"Keep her so," he said to the quartermaster. "Mr Tull. Is the Blanche following?"

"Aye, sir."

"The Alcmene?"

Tull put the glass on her. "Aye, sir. She's wearing now."

"Then keep your eye on them." Quilliam wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "And on the London. If she makes anything more to us I want it before it's finished going up."

"Aye aye, sir."

He put his elbows back on the rail. The Amazon was before the wind now and running out of it, out of range, heading north for the clear air and the anchored ships, and he could feel the fort's fire falling short behind her, and then less of it, and then the sound of it was only part of the general sound of the battle, which went on to the south of them as it had all morning.

He did not look at the London. Quilliam had told him to, and he would; there was time. He had the glass up, and he turned it south instead, back the way they had come.

The Amazon was out of the smoke now, or nearly; she was running ahead of it with the same wind that carried it, and she could not outrun it altogether, but as she went the rolls of it came up behind her thinner and further apart. Between two of them he saw the British line. Not all of it. A length of it, for perhaps the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer, lying at anchor in the sun, every ship of it still firing.

The Defiance nearest, with thirty-nine at her yardarm. And above it, at her masthead, sixteen.

He moved the glass along. There was the Elephant, where she had always been, abreast of her Danish ship. There was the blue flag at her fore. And at her masthead, flying out stiff and clear now the smoke had gone off it, where it had flown since ten o'clock, the signal for close action. No other flag beside it. Nothing at all.

He watched it until the smoke came over again. Then he put the glass under his arm and turned round and looked north for the London, as he had been told.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Novembrēs (31 October 2026), ab Horātiō Nelsōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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