[1] See post; p. 65.

[2] Our West India possessions, except Jamaica, Barbados, and St. Lucia, and Antigua were lost; and the four named were about to be attacked when Rodney’s victory saved them. Demerara, our West African settlements, Trincomalee and Ceylon, Minorca, and the American Colonies went also—all because the Ministry of the day refused to keep the Fleet up to the “Two Power standard” of those times, “superior to the combined forces of the House of Bourbon,” i.e. France and Spain, who had the two next powerful fleets after Great Britain. In cash, the war cost England £200,000,000.

[3] I am indebted to the courtesy of the proprietors of the Graphic for permission to reproduce the diagrams here given.

[4] The Kent Trophy Challenge Shield, of which an illustration is given, is of silver. In the centre chief point appears a representation of H.M.S. Kent, taken from a drawing supplied by the Admiralty. This is embossed and oxydized. It is surmounted by an enamelled shield, bearing the Arms of the Association of “Men of Kent and Kentish Men.” Underneath the ship, entwined with branches of laurel, are scrolls to take the names of the Officers Commanding. The lower part of shield shows the arms and motto of the County of Kent, while turrets with protruding guns form an artistic background. Below is a large ornamental tablet displaying the presentation inscription, and round the edge of the shield flows a beautifully modelled pattern of Kentish Hops, Cherries, Oakleaves, and Cob-nuts, each spray of which is separately modelled and bent into position, forming an excellent contrast with the white and burnished groundwork shield. The whole is mounted on a stout polished-oak shield, size 2 ft. 6 in. by 2 ft., and surrounded by thirty silver wreath-medallions, to be inscribed each year with the name of the winning gun-crew’s captain. The total weight of silver used is 146 ozs.

[5] A Kent should have been with the two Kentish admirals Rooke and Byng at the taking of Gibraltar. She was with the fleet, but during the bombardment was stationed to keep watch off Cape de Gata, for the possible appearance on the scene of the French Toulon Fleet, which Rooke fought at Malaga, a month later. From on board the Kent, as the officers’ journals describe, they heard the sound of Rooke’s guns attacking Gibraltar, and uncertain whether the Toulon Fleet might not have got round by hugging the African coast, and the firing be that of the fleet in action with them, the Kent turned back to Gibraltar, arriving in time to witness the first hoisting of the British flag on the fortress.

[6] The usual term with Europeans in the East at that time for the “natives,” as we say nowadays.

[7] Nelson was forty-seven when he fell; three years older than Admiral Watson was at his death. They were both also Vice-Admirals of the White.

[8] For a full account of the Monmouth’s midnight battle and Captain Gardiner’s fate, see “Famous Fighters of the Fleet,” pp. 16-35.

[9] Visitors to modern Southsea, going over what remains of the old keep of Porchester Castle, will find scrawled all over the stonework of the walls of the upper apartments many names of the French prisoners of this time, with sometimes the names of their ships and the dates of their capture added.

[10] A full narrative of the campaign and battle is given in “Famous Fighters of the Fleet,” pp. 52-161.

[11] Mr. William Stuart, who died at Gortley, Letterkenny, in April, 1903, at the reputed age of one hundred and twenty, used often to relate how he, as a boy, saw a British frigate arrive in Lough Swilly towing the French captured flagship, and with Wolfe Tone among the prisoners.

[12] Incidentally, and to end the present story, it may be interesting to recall to mind that the Marquess of Donegall is Hereditary Admiral of Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the United Kingdom. The office had a real significance formerly, for Lough Neagh in the past, well within historic times, had a fleet of its own. Sir John Clotworthy, the ancestor of Viscount Massereene, who lived at Antrim Castle, had a patent for building as many vessels as might be needed for the King’s service on Lough Neagh. His fleet set out from Antrim Castle in 1642 to attack the Irish in their fort at Charlemont. The battle between the fleet on the lake and the land forces resulted in the defeat of the men on shore, with their fort, and important consequences. The second Viscount Massereene was as strong a supporter of William of Orange as his ancestor had been of the Stuarts. He was made captain of Lough Neagh, and received 6s. 8d. a day, being bound to build and maintain a gunboat on the lake. The Lough Neagh Navy has disappeared, but the lake has still its admiral in the Marquess of Donegall.

[13] Having regard to the number of foreigners on board the Victory, these facts are in point. For more than fifty years previous to 1794, foreigners were permitted by Act of Parliament to enter on board British merchantmen trading overseas to the extent of three-quarters of the crew. After 1794, “for the encouragement of British seamen,” an Act was passed reducing the proportion of foreigners to one-quarter of the ships’ companies, which, however, still left a large number available at various places for the purposes of impressment for the Navy. As to the “Impress Service”: in 1805, to keep up the supplies of men, forty-three permanent stations or “rendezvous” were maintained in Great Britain and Ireland, with an establishment of twenty-seven captains and sixty-three lieutenants, permanently on duty, established “in those parts of the United Kingdom where seamen chiefly resort, at which stations volunteers and impressed men are asked, and deserters from the Naval Service are apprehended.” They were distributed as follows: London and Thames, two captains and ten lieutenants; Deal and the Downs, Liverpool, and Dundee, a captain and three lieutenants at each place; Falmouth, Hull, Cork, Cowes, Poole, Waterford, Bristol, Londonderry, Leith, Shields, Dublin, Portsmouth, and Gosport, a captain and two lieutenants at each place; Newcastle, Sunderland, Yarmouth, Glasgow and Greenock, Dunbar, Limerick, Southampton, Romsey, Exeter, Lynn, Swansea, Folkestone, Ramsgate, Margate, Lerwick, and the Isle of Man, a captain and one lieutenant, or a lieutenant independently, at each place.

[14] How the Téméraire played her part at Trafalgar is fully related in “Famous Fighters of the Fleet,” pp. 231-275.

[15] “Ab.” stands for Able Seaman; “Ordinary” for Ordinary Seaman; “L.M.” for Landman or Landsmen, the lowest general rating on board a man-of-war, comprising new and raw hands for the most part not yet worked up into shape, though capable of deck duties and at the guns.

[16] Died of their wounds in the week following the battle.

[17] The letter was published in some of the newspapers in the last week of December, 1805. According to the Victory’s muster book there was a “James Bagley” among the Marines.

[18] See “The Enemy at Trafalgar” for what they witnessed from the French and Spanish fleet; also for a Spanish picture of Collingwood’s duel with the Spanish admiral.

[19] Bounce remained Collingwood’s faithful companion to the end; all through those five long, weary years of continuous cruising between Cadiz and the Dardanelles and off Toulon, until just before, for the worn out, prematurely-aged warrior himself, death came at length to close his sufferings, poor Bounce one dark night fell overboard and was seen no more.

[20] Trafalgar was also, as it happened, the Victory’s fifth fight. Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign had been eighteen years launched, and had been twice in battle. The Sovereign also was actually the biggest ship in the British fleet that day, 2175 tons burthen, as compared with the 2162 tons of the Victory, and the 2091 tons of the Britannia. The Téméraire, again, was the hardest hitter in the whole fleet, owing to the exceptionally heavy ordnance that she carried on her upper deck. Of other ships, the Agamemnon, the third oldest ship present at Trafalgar, had fought her first two battles with Kempenfelt and Rodney—names that already had passed into history. Other ships of Nelson’s fleet, contemporaries mostly of the Royal Sovereign, had taken part in as many as four fleet battles. Four of them had been in Lord Howe’s fleet on the “Glorious First of June,” three at St. Vincent, five with Nelson at the Nile, three at Copenhagen. Three of the Britannia’s consorts—the Belleisle, the Tonnant, and the Spartiate—were French-built ships, prizes won in battle. Two of them, indeed, had been captured by Nelson himself at the Nile. The average age of the ships of Nelson’s Trafalgar fleet was seventeen years, an age at which in the case of our modern-day battleships they are reckoned as off the active list and in sight of the sale list. Only six were less than five years old. One ship only was, so to speak, a new ship, the Revenge, in October, 1805, serving her first commission within seven months of leaving the stocks at Chatham Dockyard.

[21] Of the names mentioned, Mr. Johnstone may possible have been John Johnson, an ex-midshipman, rated an A.B. in July, 1805. Mr. Jones may have been Mr. Charles S. Jones, the captain’s coxswain. There were sixteen Jones’s altogether on the Britannia’s books, but none were among the officers, master’s mates, and midshipmen, or the first-class volunteers. There was no Lever on board the Britannia in any capacity.