Battle of Cape St. Vincent, 1797: Jervis, Nelson and the patent bridge

For a few hours on a misty February day in 1797, fifteen British ships of the line took on twenty-seven Spanish ones off the southwestern tip of Europe. The battle made Admiral Jervis an earl and turned a little-known commodore, Horatio Nelson, into a national hero, thanks to a decision that broke every rule of the line of battle and a boarding action that the Navy would joke about for years.²

Background: Britain alone at sea

The winter of 1796 to 1797 was a bad time for Britain. Bonaparte's victories in Italy had shaken British standing in the Mediterranean, and in 1796 Spain changed sides and became France's ally. With the Spanish fleet added to the French, the Royal Navy could no longer hold the Mediterranean. Corsica was evacuated, and Jervis's fleet withdrew to Gibraltar and then to Lisbon; by the end of 1796 not a single British ship of the line was left in that sea.³

The allies had a bigger plan. The Spanish main fleet at Cartagena, 27 ships of the line under Admiral José de Córdoba, was to sail to Brest by way of Cádiz and join the French there, in a combination that could threaten Britain itself. Jervis's task was to stop it. He left the Tagus in January 1797 with eleven ships of the line, met five reinforcements from the Channel Fleet under Rear Admiral William Parker, and took station off Cape St. Vincent with fifteen.⁴

Armies and commanders

Sir John Jervis was about sixty, an immensely experienced seaman with a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, and his ships were highly trained. Among his captains were men who would become famous: Thomas Troubridge of Culloden and Cuthbert Collingwood of Excellent. Nelson, a commodore, had just come out from the Mediterranean in the frigate Minerve, where he had overseen the evacuation of Elba. On the way out of the Strait the frigate ran into Spanish warships and was chased, but slipped away; on 13 February Nelson joined Jervis with news that the Spanish fleet was at sea, and shifted his broad pendant to the 74-gun Captain.⁵

José de Córdova y Ramos, a veteran lieutenant general of the Spanish navy born at Utrera in 1732, commanded a fleet that looked overwhelming on paper. Its flagship, the four-decker Santísima Trinidad, carried 130 guns in Clowes's list and 136 in Southey's, and six other ships carried 112. But the crews were another matter. Robert Southey, Nelson's early biographer, writes of the general incapacity of the Spanish sea officers, and William Laird Clowes, the Royal Navy's historian, describes ships with complements of 530 to 950 men that carried only 60 or 80 trained seamen apiece, the rest being soldiers and landsmen.⁶

The battle in phases

Out of the fog

Córdoba left Cartagena on 1 February, but a strong easterly gale, the Levanter, drove his fleet past Cádiz and out into the Atlantic, toward the British. Misled by an American merchant captain who had seen Jervis with only nine ships, he believed he faced a weak squadron and let his ships straggle. At 2:30 on the morning of 14 February a Portuguese frigate told Jervis that the Spanish were close to windward, and at daybreak the British saw them, scattered in two groups with a gap between them.⁷

Cutting the line

Jervis formed a single line of battle and steered for the gap, cutting off the smaller Spanish group to leeward from the main body. The ships of that smaller group tried to break through the British line to rejoin their friends; all but one were driven off. Jervis then ordered his ships to tack in succession and follow the main Spanish body to windward. It was a slow maneuver: each ship had to reach the same turning point before it could turn.⁸

Nelson leaves the line

Nelson, in Captain, was third from the rear. At about 1 p.m. he saw that the Spanish main body was bearing away to join its other half or escape, and that the head of the British line could not reach it in time. Without waiting for orders he had Captain wear out of the line and threw his single 74 across the bows of the Spanish center, where the Santísima Trinidad and several three-deckers were sailing. Britannica's biographer Tom Pocock writes that for a time Nelson was fighting seven enemy ships at once.⁹

He was not alone for long. Troubridge in Culloden came up in support, and then Blenheim passed between them and the enemy and gave them a respite. Jervis signaled Collingwood's Excellent, the last ship in the line, to join; Collingwood forced the San Isidro to strike and battered the Salvador del Mundo, then pushed on to help Nelson. His fire at a range of ten feet drove the 80-gun San Nicolás to luff up, and she fouled the 112-gun San José.¹⁰

The patent bridge for boarding

Captain was a wreck by now, her foretopmast gone and her wheel shot away. Nelson had her laid alongside San Nicolás and called for boarders. Captain Edward Berry, his former first lieutenant, was first into the enemy's mizzen chains; a soldier of the 69th Regiment smashed a cabin window and Nelson climbed in after him. The Spanish brigadier commanding the ship was shot as he retreated, and the ensign came down. When men in the San José alongside opened fire, Nelson led his party on across the deck of the first prize and boarded the three-decker too, which surrendered almost at once. On her quarterdeck the Spanish officers handed him their swords, and he passed them to his bargeman, William Fearney, who tucked them under his arm.¹¹

The fleet soon had a saying for the feat, which Nelson proudly passed on in his own account: Nelson's patent bridge for boarding first-rates. Clowes adds a sober note: Nelson believed his boarding brought about the surrender of San José, but it is practically certain that the heavy fire of Prince George had more to do with it. Even so, Clowes concedes, it takes nothing from Nelson's dash, since each time he boarded what he believed was an unbeaten enemy.¹²

Turning point

The battle turned on Nelson's decision to leave the line. Clowes calls that moment, around 1 p.m., the critical point of the action: had the Spanish been allowed to reunite, the fight would have ended inconclusively or become a long running chase toward Cádiz. By placing one ship in their path, Nelson held them until the rest of the British line could come up, and the battle became a British victory instead of a missed chance.¹³

Aftermath

Toward 4 p.m., with fresh Spanish ships coming up, Jervis signaled his fleet to bring to and cover the four prizes and the disabled ships, and the fighting died away. Clowes wonders why Jervis did not press on and why only four ships were taken; Southey answers that the British could not have re-formed without abandoning their prizes and that many of their ships were unmanageable. The British lost about 300 killed and seriously wounded; Southey notes that a quarter of the loss fell on Nelson's Captain alone. The Spanish fleet withdrew into Cádiz, where Jervis blockaded it, with Nelson commanding the inshore squadron.¹⁴

The rewards were generous. At dusk Jervis received Nelson on the quarterdeck of Victory, embraced him and said he could not thank him enough. Jervis was made Earl St. Vincent and Nelson a Knight of the Bath; his promotion to rear admiral, by seniority, came through a few days after the battle.¹⁵

Legacy and memory

Cape St. Vincent showed what a well-drilled fleet could do against a larger but poorly manned one, and it made Nelson. Clowes credits the victory to Jervis for attacking a superior force, to Troubridge for leading boldly, and to Nelson and Collingwood for doing the right thing at the right moment, while noting that the Spanish fleet was so disorganized that it would have given way before almost any bold opponent. Britannica, for its part, singles out Collingwood's conspicuous part in the victory.¹⁶

Painters made the boarding one of the set pieces of the Nelson legend. Nicholas Pocock painted it for the official Life of Nelson published in 1809, the picture at the top of this page, and George Jones gave it a full romantic treatment in 1829. Both belong today to Royal Museums Greenwich. Within a few months Nelson lost his right arm at Tenerife; eight years later he died at Trafalgar.¹⁷ › Horatio Nelson