Battle of Trafalgar’s 200th Marked With New Books

By DAVID W. MUNNS, Assistant Editor

SEIZE THE FIRE: Heroism, Duty and the Battle of Trafalgar
by Adam Nicolson, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Aug. 2005. 368 pp. $26.95.
ISBN: 0-060-75361-7

Violence abounded 200 years ago in the seas of Cape Trafalgar off southwest Spain in what many Europeans viewed as an aberration to the Age of Enlightenment, an historic intellectual movement that sought to use reason as a means of cultivating ethics, aesthetics and knowledge.

Adam Nicolson, author of God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, takes thorough note of this sentiment in his timely release of Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty and the Battle of Trafalgar. The book provides an examination of the battle in terms of its cultural context; however, Nicolson also points to its key role in the 19th century societal shift.

“Battle, sacrifice, the glittering sword, the rivers of blood, the midnight hour, the dangers that stand before you: all those were real enough at Trafalgar, and the new millennium of peaceful dominance they led to was not something in the next world but in this,” Nicolson writes.

Shaping the ultimate destiny of Europe in a sweeping defeat of Napoleon’s imperial forces, Trafalgar became the pivotal moment in defining England’s 19th-century image with the Royal Navy’s defeat of the then-allied French and Spanish navies.

Nicolson does an astute job of providing an anecdotal history of the social tide in Europe in 1805, and connects broader cultural shifts with the historic relevancy of British Lord Horatio Nelson’s triumph at Trafalgar.

Evidencing age-old principles of heroism and duty to one’s country, Nicolson examines whether this violent battle was a seminal revolt by the British to create a unified, commercially liberated Europe, or just a product of England’s contrary desire for a hero to wage a bloody confrontation in order to secure commercialism and dominance at sea in the new century.

Regardless of its symbolism, Nelson’s success in thwarting Napoleonic forces accorded him admiration and hero status at the time by any Englander’s terms, for the country had proved victorious and simultaneously bridged the gateway for transcontinental enlightenment.

Nicolson points to British gains from enlightenment era knowledge and urbanization in direct opposition to a less modern Spanish society that mirrored France, a country entangled in post-revolutionary ideological ferments. He parallels these factors with each country’s navy. While France had lost its class system and Spain’s navy was harnessed by autocratic rule, Nicolson asserts, the Royal Navy drew from its illustrious middle and upper classes, making it a conglomerate of men determined to achieve.

Described by Nicolson as men known for “manliness, honour, gentlemanliness,” the players in Trafalgar garnered liberty and exemplified opposition to tyranny, which entrenched key values of 18th-century rationalism, as England and the world began a shift to 19th-century romanticism. The book points to the emotional state on the battlefield, and how ultimately it affirmed the “unrivaled creation of a God-blessed, rangingly commercial British Empire.”

Packed with analysis from an expert historian, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar offers a framework for analyzing the Battle of Trafalgar in terms of social milieus and ultimately deems it the first significant event of European enlightenment.

Also Received:

THE TRAFALGAR COMPANION
Edited by Alexander Stilwell, New York: Osprey Publishing, Sept. 2005. 224 pp. $29.95.
ISBN: 1-84176-835-9

Published in conjunction with the British Royal Navy, The Trafalgar Companion compiles analyses of leading historians from Britain, France and the United States to provide a complete examination of the Battle of Trafalgar, beginning with an analysis of the tension preceding the battle to an examination of the military, political and cultural legacy of the Royal Navy.

A percentage of the proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Save the Victory Fund, a charity that supports and maintains Nelson’s flagship.

Seapower does not review works of fiction or self-published books.