Horatio Nelson

Biography

Horatio Nelson was Britain's greatest naval commander and the man who ensured that France's Revolutionary Wars victories on land could never translate into strategic dominance of the seas. A Norfolk clergyman's son who had gone to sea at 12, he was already a veteran commander when the Revolutionary Wars began — and had lost his right eye at the siege of Calvi (1794) and his right arm at Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1797) by the time his greatest victory arrived. The Battle of the Nile (1798) was his masterwork. Finding the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, anchored in what its commanders believed was an impregnable defensive line, Nelson sent half his force to attack from the landward side — a maneuver the French had not thought possible, because they believed the water too shallow. It wasn't. Caught between two fires, the French fleet was annihilated in a night battle of extraordinary violence. Thirteen of seventeen French ships were captured or destroyed. Napoleon's army was stranded in Egypt. Nelson was killed at Trafalgar in 1805 — the battle where he destroyed the Franco-Spanish fleet and ended any French hope of controlling the seas. He died at the moment of his greatest triumph, shot by a French sharpshooter, having received news that the battle was won. He was brought back to Britain preserved in a cask of brandy and buried in St Paul's Cathedral. The entire nation mourned.

Key Battles