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HMS VICTORY

HMS Victory stands second to none in the hearts of British seamen.

Forever associated with Nelson's last battle at Trafalgar, Victory is one of the most famous ships of all time. A First Rate ship of the line--Victory was the most  successful 100-gun ship of the period, the flagship of half a dozen famous admirals.

227 feet long, Victory was equivalent to a WWII battleship with 5 decks.   She was the first that had three gun decks.   After six years of construction, Victory was launched in 1765 with a complement of 850 sailors. Her construction took 6,000 oak trees.  This equates to 100 acres of woodland. Hull thickness at waterline is 2 ft.  She cost 63,176 British pounds to build—an equivalent to the cost today of an aircraft carrier. 

Victory was essential to Britain's continued superiority on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars. She was the legendary flagship of Admiral Horatio Nelson against France and Spain alliance in the famous Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.  It was this naval battle that changed the course of Napoleonic Europe.  Britain would rule the seas uncontested for a century.

Until the Battle of Trafalgar, it had been the custom for fleets to do battle by sailing past or alongside each other in two parallel lines. Nelson completely break this tradition. He divided his fleet into two groups that would attack the enemy at right angles, breaking through the French and Spanish lines and cutting off their retreat. This aggressive strategy would forever change the course of naval warfare.

The English fleet sailed toward the enemy, who fired the first shot at the Royal Sovereign at noon. Because the ships were perpendicular to each other, for the twenty agonizing minutes it took to reach the enemy lines, the lead ships of the two British attack groups were forced to endure continuous fire in silence. Then the Royal Sovereign drew astern of the Spanish three-decker Santa Anna, raking her decks with a murderous double-shot volley that killed and wounded 400.

On the other prong, the Victory sailed on, under unrelenting rain of cannon shot, searching for the French admiral’s ship. When seeing the huge Spanish four-decker Santissima Trinidad, Nelson correctly assumed that the French admiral’s ship was nearby and bore down on the Santissima Trinidad. As he did, the Bucentaure, Villeneuve´s flagship, and seven or eight other enemy ships fired on the Victory. Still she advanced. By the time she had come close enough to rake the Santissima Trinidad with her larboard guns, 50 of her men were dead and 30 wounded.

At that point, the bloodied Victory collided with the French Redoubtable. Locked together,  the two ships drifted slowly through the battle. A sniper kneeling in the mizzen-top of the Redoubtable aimed his musket at Nelson. 

In the meantime, the Redoubtable’s top marksmen had shot down 40 British officers and men. Seeing the upper deck populated only by the dead and wounded, the French tried to board the Victory. Victory’s botswain’s whistle piped the tune signifying “boarders; repel boarders,” and the order immediately summoned swarms of smoke-begrimed blue-jackets to the deck, where they killed every man who had managed to board.

Below decks, Nelson´s life was ebbing away fast. But he lived to see Captain Hardy return from the fighting above to hear the news that fourteen enemy vessels had given in. “That’s well,” Nelson said, “but I had bargained for twenty.”

The destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet gave England the power to rule an empire that included India, Canada, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and preside over a world economy in which London was the financial heart of Europe.