Even an uncommonly warm and industrious imagination could scarcely produce the frail shape of Commodore Nelson leaping from his battered seventy-four-gun Captain through the quarter-gallery window of the eighty-gun San Nicolas, taking her, and hurrying on across her deck to board the towering San Josef of a hundred and twelve guns, so that ‘on the deck of a Spanish first-rate, extravagant as the story may seem, did I receive the swords of the vanquished Spaniards; which, as I received, I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen, who put them, with the greatest sang-froid, under his arm’. The pages of Beatson, James and the Naval Chronicle, the Admiralty papers in the Public Record Office, the biographies in Marshall and O’Byrne are filled with actions that may be a little less spectacular (there was only one Nelson), but that are certainly no less spirited—actions that few men could invent and perhaps none present with total conviction. That is why I have gone straight to the source for the fighting in this book.
