Tom PocockRezensionen

This is a well constructed eyewitness account of this most famous of naval battles on 21 October 1805, using accounts from a wide range of participants on both the English, and the French and Spanish side under Napoleon. This battle was seen, first and foremost, as "the final defeat of Napoleon’s hopes of invading the British Isles" and the battle that "had given Britain command of the sea, however many more battleships Napoleon might build". It therefore probably deserves to be seen alongside other such existential threats to Britain as the Normans in 1066 and the Nazis in 1940. This account shows each stage of the battle, through the run up to it, the course of events on 21 October including of course the death of Nelson, and the aftermath, including the storm that dispersed many surviving ships, and the transport of Nelson's body back to London for his funeral. One of the most poignant themes is the mixed feelings of Britons, relief at the victory of Britain over Napoleonic forces, mixed hugely with sadness at the death of Nelson, a genuine popular hero with ordinary landlubber Britons as well as with the rank and file sailors in British ships; in the words of one seaman in Nelson's flagship the Victory, "Great God! I would rather the shot had taken off my head and spared his life".

One minor criticism I had is that perhaps the extracts from eyewitnesses dominated the text a little too much, and I could perhaps have done with a little more analysis and commentary on the events.

El Almirante Nelson en palabras de Pocock, es el prototipo de héroe para los ingleses, gracias a él Gran Bretaña ostentó la supremacía en el mar por mucho tiempo.

A quite interesting service biography. I note that the battle of Lissa, where Hoste defeated a numerically superior force, would make a good centrepiece in a naval novel...oh...O'brien did that. A very readable book.½

This biography of Nelson was a Whitbread Biography Award runner up in 1987. It is very well written and comprehensively covers all aspects of the life of this national hero. He was a man of great contrasts: a hero on the national scale who saved the country from the very real threat of French invasion, yet retained the respect, admiration and love of the common sailor; of relatively humble origins compared to other naval officers, the son of a Norfolk clergyman, he was the friend of the highest in society including William Pitt and King George III; while intervening in individual cases of injustice in favour of the common sailor, he was also a reactionary supporter of the monarchy both in Britain and in Naples, who had no sympathy for rising liberal ideas promoted by Thomas Paine and others (though he spoke in favour of an old comrade tried and hanged for planning regicide); while brought up in a morally conventional ethos, he flouted society's conventions by his affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, outrageously living in a menage a trois with her and her much older husband, Sir William, and treating his wife Fanny very shabbily.

This book took me a while to get through; I began it after a recent return visit to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Parts of it dragged for me and I have always found reading descriptions of military engagements fairly dull, though the description of Trafalgar here is gripping as one leads up to the inevitable outcome. It is undoubtedly a work of great scholarship and a definitive biography.½

I am currently reading this and find it fascinating. Marryat was the father of the naval fiction genre and still one of the best.

A bit slow to start with but once it gets going it is great. If your interested in strategy, adventure or the Napoleonic wars it should be up your alley. The battle of Maida in 1806, the Dardanelles and Egypt in 1809,Sicily and the battles on the Isle of Capri, the Tyrols and naval warfare in the Adriatic. If any of this sounds of interest do read this book.