The British Navy is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar at which Haratio Nelson, Britain’s greatest naval hero, gained a glorious death and a grand victory over Napoleon’s navy on October 21, 1805.
Nelson is revered throughout the British Empire like Wellington, Churchill, Drake and many others whose dearth has never come by the British nation. In June this year, a grand fleet of 174 vessels from 35 navies were assembled at Spit Head, in South of England to commemorate the battle and to pay tribute to Nelson. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, as Lord High Admiral of the British Navy, reviewed this fleet as a part of Trafalgar bicentenary celebrations. The French Navy sent its biggest ship, the nuclear aircraft career, Charles DeGaulle as did the Spanish Navy to partake in the naval review — here yesterday’s allies met the yesterday’s victor on a common ground under the shadows of Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory preserved and permanently ‘parked’ in dry-dock in Royal Naval Dockyard, Portsmouth, at a little distance away from the review line!
Nelson had defeated Napoleon’s Navy twice. The first victory occurred at the Battle of Nile in 1798, when Nelson surprised and destroyed French armada at anchor near Alexandria. The second battle was, of course, at Trafalgar as the French and Spanish fleets attempted to slip from the port of Cadiz in Spain northwards to English Channel, perhaps to invade and conquer England. Earlier exploits of Nelson in the warfare at sea had by the time of the Battle of Trafalgar earned him a hero’s status in the esteem of his countrymen and in the Royal Navy itself. Nelson, who went to sea as a boy, was a Sea Captain at the age of 20. He had been blinded in one eye at the Battle of Corsica in 1794, and lost his right arm in 1797 at the Battle of Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands. And at the Battle of Trafalgar the hero met his mortal end!
At the battle of Trafalgar on October 21,1805,at noon, Victory, Nelson’s flagship engaged the French naval Vessel Redoubtable and started attacking with both cannon and small arms fire. The French Captain, Lucas, sent snipers up the mizzen tops of his ship that poured shots down the deck of Victory. The traditional definition of a sniper is a marksman who kills a selected adversary from concealment with rifle at a large distance.
Nelson, in full regalia of the Vice Admiral and with very known physical features, was quite obvious on the deck of the Victory. He was well marked by the sniper who sent bullets firing into his shoulder. The bullet travelled on to Nelson’s spine. He was mortally wounded and died on Victory’s deck in the heat of a great victory over the French Fleet. His corpse was preserved in a casket filled with French brandy (what a coincidence!) on journey back to England where he was buried as a national hero in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Whilst Nelson lay dying, an 18-year old midshipman, John Pollard, picked up a musket and fired upon the Frenchman who had shot the Admiral. Later, Captain John Hardy the Commanding Officer of HMS Victory, credited John Pollard with killing the sniper. This John Pollard went on to a long but undistinguished naval career, during which he lived on the reputation he had won as Nelson’s avenger. But in latter years, in response to public interest in whether he or another midshipman named Edward Collingwood had actually killed the sniper, he wrote to The Time London about the probability of misidentify of the actual killer caused in the confusion of battle!
Just as the controversy surrounds the name of Nelson’s Avenger, a mystery also surrounds, till to date, as to who actually was this French rifleman who had killed Nelson! The killer was always described as an anonymous infantryman. However, the French side had claimed that Sergeant Guillemard fired at Nelson from the mizzenmast of Redoubtable and had survived to tell the story. But the British navy always doubted this statement, further adding to the mystery of Nelson’s killer.
Recently, there has been a strange twist to this mystery. A hitherto unpublished historical adventure novel by the French author Alexandre Dumas (circa 1802-1870), was discovered by chance in 1988. This novel, which is titled Le Chevalier de Saint-Hermine, gives another identity to Nelson’s killer. Alexandre Dumas, the grandson of a Haitians slave and the son of a General in Napoleon’s army, was a prolific novelist and playwright who produced the classics like The Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Christo, The Black Tulip and many more. He is credited with having produced about 250 works. He remains the most widely read French writer around the world. He died in 1870 and was buried in commoners’ graveyard. But, in November 2002, the writer was given the highest posthumous honour when his remains were buried with national honours in the Pantheon, the mausoleum of French national heroes.
In 1988, a French researcher and Dumas specialist, Claude Schopp by name, was trying to trace the details of an article in the old copies of Le Montieur Universel. By chance he discovered an almost completed work signed Alexandre Dumas under the title Le Chevalier de Sainte — Hermine (The Knight of Saint — Hermine). This novel had appeared in serial form in the French newspapers during Dumas’ lifetime and lacked just a few chapters when Dumas died in 1870. Schopp kept the discovery a secret and worked for a decade on the manuscript, which contained many inconsistencies. He has now added a short section to bring the tale to its conclusion. The 900-page book has been published and went on sale in June this year in France.
The mystery as to who killed Admiral Nelson is explained in this novel. Le Chevalier de Saint — Hermine is a typical Dumas adventure novel about the start of Napoleonic empire and includes an interesting account of the Battle of Trafalgar. And in it, we learn, that it is the hero of the novel, the Chevalier himself, who shoots Nelson. We learn that the Chevalier is an aristocrat who was fascinated with the emerging Napoleonic empire. Dumas’ specialty was inserting fictional characters into historical stories — and the Chevalier who killed Nelson in the novel might as well have been as fictional!
