Note 20 — IX ON BOARD OUR FLAGSHIPS AT TRAFALGAR

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.