Horatio Nelson could be said to have been accident-prone. In 1794, at the siege of Calvi, for example, a shot had hit a wall of sand bags, driving sand and stones into the future Admiral's face, causing him to lose the sight of his right eye.
Then, in 1797, he lost an arm in Tenerife, when he was hit just above the right elbow by a whiff of grapeshot. Thus Nelson was something of a shipwreck by the time he arrived at the Battle of Trafalgar 192 years ago.
Cape Trafalgar lies about 40 miles west of Gibraltar along the Spanish coast. It was near here, on October 21st, 1805, that Nelson encountered the Combined Fleet of the French and Spanish navies sailing from Cadiz, and gave his famous signal "England expects every man to do his duty".
Despite the Combined Fleet's superiority of numbers, Nelson won the day; the victory at Trafalgar proved to be a turning point in the Napoleonic Wars, and the destruction of the French and Spanish ships inaugurated a century of British naval domination. But there were two serious down-sides to the escapade.
The first, of course, was that poor Nelson died. Near the end of the encounter, just as things were going well, a stray musket shot caused the Admiral to exclaim to Hardy: "They have done for me at last!" Then, even more famously, he sighed: "Kiss me, Hardy," and expired. But the weather had an even nastier jolt in store for the survivors.
One of the great advantages of victory in naval war in those days was "the prize". Captured ships, and all that they contained, were eagerly impounded by the winning side, the booty largely to be shared, pro rata, by officers and men alike. After Trafalgar, the British found themselves in possession of no less than 17 such prizes, and all they had to do was get them back to safety in Gibraltar.
Meteorology, unfortunately, intervened. During the battle itself the wind had been a moderate south-westerly, maintained by a depression to the west of Spain. That evening however, the depression deepened rapidly, and from October 22nd until the 25th, gale to storm force on-shore winds, and a powerful swell, pounded the British fleet and captured ships alike. All the English survived, albeit only just, but the captives, being in poor condition and manned by only skeleton crews, were tantalisingly, one by one, driven on to the rocky Spanish coast and wrecked. Only three "prizes" struggled into Gibraltar five days later, leaving the immediate spoils of victory so meagre that many must have wondered why they bothered.