On 9 October 1805, aboard HMS Victory off Cadiz, Horatio Nelson finished a memorandum marked “Secret.” The combined French and Spanish fleet lay in the harbour there. When it came out, Nelson meant to bring it to battle in a way that would make the business “decisive.”
His problem was time. Forming a fleet of forty ships into a single line of battle, in variable winds and thick weather, could take so long that the chance would be lost. So the memo dropped the line. The fleet would sail in two lines with an advanced squadron, and the order of sailing would be the order of battle. His second in command, Cuthbert Collingwood, would have “the entire direction of his Line” once Nelson’s intentions were known.
The plan was full of numbers: forty ships a side, sixteen to a line, Collingwood’s line to break through about the twelfth ship from the enemy’s rear. A note in the margin added that if either fleet was smaller, only a proportionate number of enemy ships should be cut off. Then Nelson admitted the limits of all of it. “Something must be left to chance,” he wrote; “nothing is sure in a Sea Fight beyond all others.”
Near the end came one sentence for when the rest could not reach them: “in case Signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy.”
The captains had heard the plan before they read it. According to Royal Museums Greenwich, Nelson laid out his tactics over dinner on 29 and 30 September. On 1 October he wrote to Emma Hamilton that when he explained “the Nelson touch,”“it was like an electric shock. Some shed tears, all approved.” That is his own account. Signed copies of the memorandum then went to every captain in the fleet.
On 21 October the fleets met off Cape Trafalgar. The numbers were wrong: Nelson had 27 ships, and 33 had sailed from Cadiz. The shape held. Collingwood’s column hit the enemy rear and Nelson’s split the line, which Greenwich describes as what Nelson had intended.
After that, in Greenwich’s words, the battle became “a ferocious pounding match.” In the account by the naval historian William James, which Nelson’s editor Nicholas Harris Nicolas reprinted in 1846, each British captain reaching the enemy line acted on the memorandum and attached himself to “the first Frenchman or Spaniard that crossed his path.” Most had also received Nelson’s spoken word that morning, passed on by frigate captains, to break the enemy line wherever they conveniently could. James judged that latitude “particularly beneficial” as enemy ships kept shifting position.
Nelson was shot on Victory at 1.15pm and died at 4.30pm. Greenwich credits the British advantage to his planning and to better-trained gunners. It also says the victory had little overall effect on the course of the war: six weeks later, Napoleon won at Austerlitz.
When firing stopped at 5.30pm, 17 enemy ships had been captured and another was a blazing wreck. Then a storm came up, and most of the prizes had to be abandoned.