High Tide Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World

One April morning in 1771,

a 12-year-old boy was rowed along the River Medway in Chatham, Kent,

to begin a new life as a midshipman in the Royal Navy.

In the waters all around him,

the great warships of the Navy lay at anchor.

Having won a long and vicious global conflict with France -

the Seven Years War - Britain was at peace,

and much of her mighty fleet was now mothballed, tied up in port.

As the boy passed the mighty HMS Victory, he would have looked up

and seen that her decks were covered and her gun ports were tightly shut.

Little can he ever have imagined their fates would one day collide.

34 years later, he would stand on the quarter deck of the Victory,

commanding the fleet in the most epic naval battle in British history...

Trafalgar.

The boy's name was Horatio Nelson, and within his lifetime,

Britain would construct the most powerful maritime fighting force in history.

Far more than just a wooden fleet, the Navy was a national enterprise.

Its voracious demand for ships fuelled the Industrial Revolution,

while funding it drove radical financial reforms

which we still live with today.

At sea, its highly trained crews and ambitious officers

laid claim to a burgeoning empire,

and pushed back the horizons of the known world.

But there would be a huge price to pay for this global sea power.

Britain and her Navy would soon be dragged into the greatest sequence

of wars the nation had ever seen.

It would be a fight for Britain's security, her way of life,

her very identity - a colossal struggle against her old enemy, France.

And the outcome would be decided out here, at sea.

A year before the young Nelson began his career at sea,

a Royal Navy ship was sailing deep in the South Pacific ocean,

12,000 miles from home.

The skies had cleared after heavy storms, and to the west,

high cliffs emerged through the cloud.

The ship's captain decided to name this uncharted piece of land

Cape Howe, in honour of one of the Navy's finest sailors.

The captain made a precise note of Cape Howe's co-ordinates in his

private journal, and then continued north along this unknown coastline.

The date was 20th April 1770, the ship was called the Endeavour.

Her commander was James Cook.

The son of a humble Scottish labourer, Cook had worked his way up

through the Navy's ranks to become one of the service's

most respected navigators and cartographers.

His reward was command of a high profile mission...

not to fight, but to explore.

Bring the full mast round. Come on, straight full over.

Backed by the Royal Society, the Admiralty

drew up plans for a scientific expedition to the Pacific.

It would be a journey deep into the unknown.

In 1768, Cook set off from Plymouth with a crew of 70,

including artists, astronomers and botanists.

They sailed across the Atlantic,

through the treacherous waters around Cape Horn

and then across the Pacific, to begin observations in Tahiti.

Then they turned south into uncharted seas.

Cook obsessively logged the Endeavour's speed, course and position

so that future naval crews could retrace his route precisely.

Missions like this were equipped with the latest navigational technologies.

Including a new British invention to measure latitude

which is still in use today...

the sextant.

Every day at noon, the ship's officers would line up here on the rail of the quarterdeck

with their sextants, to measure the angle between the sun and the horizon.

Now, this helped them to fix the distance that the ship was north

or south of the equator - very sophisticated piece of kit.

Very hard to use though, particularly as the deck was always rolling around.

it was very difficult to fix the sun precisely.

The Navy also led a grand experiment with cutting-edge precision clocks,

known as chronometers.

Cook would go on to pioneer their use to measure a ship's longitude.

The Navy was mastering the sea, not through cannon fire,

but by harnessing innovative science and technology.

As they journeyed further into the unknown,

the Endeavour's civilian crew

documented more than 1,000 new animal and plant varieties

and they painted vivid pictures of local peoples and customs.

But for the Admiralty, Cook's expedition was

not simply to satisfy the Royal Society's thirst for knowledge.

While the desire to collect scientific data was real enough,

Cook also had a set of secret instructions.

They told him to take possession of convenient situations

in the name of the King of Great Britain.

Cook was going to claim undiscovered lands for the British.

This shows that the mission was as political as it was scientific.

Cook was going to extend British influence

to the very furthest corners of the globe.

In the 18th century, land was power -

a source of new markets, with new products to exploit -

and there was fierce competition for it.

The French Foreign Minister condemned Britain's Imperial project.

Britain, he said, was a restless and greedy nation.

As Cook crossed the Pacific, the French explorer

Louis de Bougainville was also circumnavigating the globe.

It was a perfect excuse to claim lands for his king.

Bougainville wanted to stop what he described as Britain's project of universal monarchy.

"We must anticipate them," he cried.

The race for global supremacy was on.

Bougainville and Cook were searching for a mythical southern continent,

another new world of riches believed to exist deep in the southern ocean.

So, when Captain Cook's look-out spotted land at Cape Howe that

April evening in 1770, the stakes couldn't have been higher.

Cook followed the coastline until his look-outs spotted

a beautiful natural harbour.

When they sailed into it, the sea was full of stingrays

and he called it Sting Ray Cove, but later,

after he'd been ashore and seen the bewildering variety of plants there,

he renamed it Botany Bay.

Little did he know it at the time, but this wasn't just some

insignificant South Pacific island. This was Australia.

Cook claimed this new land for his king.

The Navy he sailed with had grown beyond its traditional role as a fighting force.

It had become a vehicle of empire building, projecting British power,

driving commerce and conquest to the far side of the world.

Captain Cook drew up more than 40 maps and surveys

as he sailed across the South Pacific.

Today, they're held at the British Library in London.

This is a collection of sketches and charts actually made by James Cook

as he led the crew of the Endeavour

on that extraordinary voyage of discovery. This one shows

the track of the Endeavour through the South Pacific, this dotted line here.

And then it shows him arriving at the east coast of Australia here, where he

went on to chart 2,000 miles of that coastline, naming the key points and

marking out navigational hazards.

And he's written, probably quite proudly here, "Discovered in 1770".

Previous to his voyage, much of this space here just would have

been blank, but now he's sailing through it, filling in the gaps.

What I find so fascinating about the Navy in this period

is how these expeditions were unlocking the secrets of the globe.

This age of naval exploration may not have involved spectacular battles, but its

impact was every bit as significant, both for the Navy's own prestige and

Britain's international standing.

As soon as Cook got home, the British Government published these charts to prove that

his discoveries were genuine,

but it was about much more than geography, it was about politics.

Both the British Government and Cook were laying claim

to this coast of Australia, which Cook even called New South Wales,

and if you look at the other names he's choosing, they're

ostentatiously patriotic -

particularly this one, Cape St George.

I mean, you can't get more British than that.

Australia would prove one of Britain's most valuable colonies.

English speaking, cricket playing, British in institution and law.

Yet, for the personalities and skills of the crews involved,

it could all have been very different.

One year before Cook sighted Australia,

Louis de Bougainville had reached the Great Barrier Reef.

But the French explorer was deterred by the dangerous shallow waters.

By 1771, goods from her colonies were pouring into Britain.

Dockside, merchant ships unloaded precious hardwoods from North America,

salted fish from Canada, exotic silks and spices from India.

The Empire had never been so rich or so extensive -

and it was the Navy's job to keep it that way.

This was the inheritance of young sailors like Horatio Nelson.

One of hundreds of midshipmen, trainee officers,

being toughened up to do their duty at sea.

# When I was one I banged my drum The day I went to sea

# I jumped aboard a pirate ship and the captain said to me

# We're going this way, that way Forwards and backwards

# Over the Irish Sea... #

Places, places!

THEY GROAN

Just as Nelson would have done more than 200 years ago,

these cadets, aboard the training ship, Royalist,

are being taught the dangerous and demanding arts of tall ship sailing.

What these guys are learning here is that in order to make this ship

work safely and efficiently, you've got to work as a team and you've got to obey orders.

Everything has a set procedure.

The Royal Navy was a meritocracy. The sea was an unforgiving master,

and to get promoted up through the ranks,

you had to prove that you could sail and fight.

Nelson initially showed little sign of such promise.

The captain of his first warship asked, "What had poor Horace done,

"who is so weak that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea?"

Nelson was far from alone.

Recruits as young as ten were sent to sea for months at a time, surrounded by the same faces,

confined within the same wooden walls.

It was as much a psychological test as a physical one.

The Navy's solution to this was to insist on a strict routine -

the same no matter what ship you were on, no matter where you were in the world.

The young men would have learned self-reliance and to obey orders

in order to overcome the terror and the tedium of being at sea.

I want that sheet secure.

It was often a life of hard labour, of lifting and mending sails and

rigging, carrying cannon balls and gun powder.

Yet it was also, for many young officers,

a rare chance to get an education.

The rigours of climbing aloft were interspersed with traditional school lessons,

with emphasis on the complex mathematics and trigonometry

required for navigation.

Through this regime, the Navy turned children like Nelson

from unpromising raw recruits into experienced fighting men.

Nelson himself remembered, "Thus, by degrees, I became a good pilot

"and confident of myself."

By the age of just 19, when he became a lieutenant,

Nelson had travelled over 45,000 miles around the world.

Like thousands of other young boys,

Nelson was seeing the sheer scale of Britain's global ambition at

first hand, and visiting her growing empire.

He'd been down into the southern oceans,

rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean.

He almost died of malaria in Bombay, helping safeguard British trading

interests in the east, and he'd even fought pirates in the Caribbean.

Nelson had joined the ranks of a highly professional force -

sailors filled, as he said, "with ardent ambition".

They were a band of brothers,

dedicated to the projection of British power on a world stage.

The Navy's increasing global reach

changed how Britain saw the world and their place within it.

In 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts was established in central London.

It was an opportunity seized upon by a canny Admiralty.

They put on display paintings of naval missions,

some of which are held today at the National Maritime Museum.

The Admiralty collection includes works by Captain Cook's onboard artist, William Hodges.

His paintings depicted Britain's growing empire.

Britain was naming and mapping the world and now,

by capturing it on canvas, in many ways she was claiming it as well.

The people who saw these paintings were left with a very simple and

immediate message - that Britain didn't just rule the world's oceans, but the world itself.

Visitors to the exhibitions could furnish their own homes

with copies of these images,

as print shops opened up in the streets around the Royal Academy.

Marine art had never been so popular.

This is a view of Portsmouth Harbour,

painted in 1770 by Dominic Serres, and it's dominated

by this fantastic ship of the line, a battleship anchored here

in the middle with its two rows of cannons

run out, hatches open and the captain on the stern, perhaps

talking to the first lieutenant. And there's some figures here, in the foreground.

An unfeasibly smart-looking seaman here, perhaps in his Sunday rig,

talking to a naval officer, and two marine officers here,

lounging around on some cannon.

This, then, is how the Admiralty wanted the British to see their

Navy - ordered, well equipped, ready for any eventuality.

But these images disguised an extraordinary truth.

That a navy that wasn't fighting

risked falling into neglect and disrepair.

After a decade of peace, British naval expenditure was at less than

a quarter of its wartime levels,

and much of the fleet was mothballed or simply tied up in port.

One admiral complained that, of 35 ships under his command, only six were seaworthy.

To make matters worse, across the Channel in France,

the King wasn't just painting pretty pictures of his fleet.

He was building an entirely new one.

Louis XVI was determined to end the Royal Navy's pre-eminence at sea.

He ordered the construction of new docks and oversaw the completion of 80 new warships.

Ready to pounce, Louis now waited for the right moment

to deploy his powerful new fleet and ruin Britain.

His opportunity would come from 3,000 miles to the west,

across the Atlantic Ocean, from within the British Empire.

On the 9th of May, 1768, British customs officials in Boston harbour

boarded an American merchant ship, The Liberty.

It was carrying a cargo of imported Madeira wine.

The next morning, customs officials inspected the hold of the ship.

They were a little bit suspicious when they discovered that it

contained only a quarter of her total capacity.

They thought that during the night people had

been secretly unloading the cargo to avoid paying customs duties.

They asked the Royal Navy to impound The Liberty.

Working alongside customs officials, naval ships were enforcing stringent

tariffs on American trade.

The revenues raised helped pay for the Royal Navy and for colonial

defence, but the very principle was anathema to the Americans.

The Liberty's owner, John Hancock, was arrested for tax evasion.

He sat in the dock for five months before the case collapsed.

All across the eastern seaboard, American traders faced what they

saw as harassment from an aggressive British fleet.

The Navy, which for centuries had been held up by the British

as the defender of their liberties from foreign tyranny,

was now seen by many in America as a tyrant herself.

It was a perception that was forcing them to reconsider

their entire relationship with Britain.

The tension would culminate on the 4th of July 1776,

with the Declaration of American Independence.

Most prominent among the signatures was John Hancock,

the owner of the Liberty.

Britain was now at war with her own subjects.

Back home, the Navy board went into overdrive

to supply over 100 ships now fighting a transatlantic war.

But after two years of conflict, as the new Navy board controller,

Charles Middleton, made his way to work in London's Seething Lane,

the Navy was in deep crisis.

What had begun as a local civil war between Britain

and her rebellious colonists with a rag-tag army,

had now turned into a truly global contest,

because a few months before, France, sensing her opportunity for revenge,

had declared war on Britain.

In 1778, King Louis XVI ordered his new fleet across the Atlantic to support the American rebels.

Within months, the French navy had forced British troops to abandon

America's biggest city, Philadelphia.

The situation was perilous.

The enemy, Middleton warned, outnumber us at every station.

The solution to the problem seems obvious - to build more ships.

But it could take up to five years and 2,000 trees to construct a single warship.

Middleton didn't have the time or resources to build a new fleet.

The only option was to improve the ships he already had.

Just a few weeks after he began work at the Navy board,

a letter from a Mr Fisher arrived on Middleton's desk.

Fisher's original correspondence doesn't survive, but its content

is referred to in records held at the National Maritime Museum.

This is a letter written by the Navy Board to their colleagues at the

Admiralty on the 27th of January, 1779, and it contains a vital clue.

It mentions Mr Fisher, calls him a ship builder from Liverpool

whose ships did a brisk trade with West Africa.

Now, in these warm tropical waters, shipworm were a real problem.

These little worm would burrow into the hull of a ship and weaken the fabric of the vessel,

but also, long tentacles of seaweed would form, clinging onto the sides

of the ship and really slow it down.

Mr Fisher's solution was copper sheathing.

Coating the underside of the hull beneath the water line with copper panels.

Thus protecting the integrity of the ship and, crucially,

making it travel a lot faster through the water.

Middleton saw in this experimental technology a possible solution to his problem.

He would sheath the bottoms of his wooden fleet in copper.

It was, though, an expensive process and Middleton urgently needed money

if he was to, as he put it, "Extricate us from present danger".

Middleton petitioned the king, George III, for a personal meeting at Buckingham House.

He said, "It was a matter of the greatest consequence".

And what better way to convince the King than to take along a beautiful

scale model? And this is the actual

one that Middleton brought to that meeting with George III.

It's of HMS Bellona, which was a 74-gun battleship,

and the detail is wonderful - you can see the wood carvings

and the paintings along the side. But the really important detail

is the copper plating below the water line down here.

There would have been about 3,000 plates of copper on a full-sized ship of this kind,

but this detail is so intricate, you can see the nails that actually hold the copper plates to the hull.

It must have really impressed the King because he threw his support

behind the Navy's bold project to spend huge amounts of money on a totally unproven technology.

It was a great industrial challenge.

Sheathing just one ship could require 15 tonnes of copper.

But Middleton drove the project forward.

At Portsmouth docks, he placed orders to copper-bottom 51 Navy ships within the year.

It was a uniquely British triumph.

Only British industry had the ability to produce copper on such a scale.

Here at Parys Mountain in North Wales,

5,000 men worked the rich seams of an open cast copper mine.

During its lifetime, Parys produced over 130,000 tonnes of copper,

much of it to supply the Navy with this vital munition of war.

The copper was sourced exclusively from British mines

and the smelting process required a vast quantity of coal

which itself needed mining, often using new steam engines

which drained water out of the deepest shafts.

The finished products needed to be carried on new roads and new merchant ships.

All of this created new jobs and economic communities all over the country.

The Royal Navy wasn't just benefiting

from domestic industrialisation, it was also accelerating it.

But as the naval dockyards rushed to complete the task of coppering the fleet,

across the Atlantic in America, the war effort was crumbling.

In 1781, the French Navy had blockaded the British Army in Chesapeake Bay,

cutting off their supply lines by sea and forcing them to surrender.

In that moment, the American colonies were lost.

One naval defeat, and half a continent slipped out of Britain's grasp.

20,000 stranded British troops had to be evacuated.

The newly promoted Captain Nelson

joined a naval force sent to bring them home.

And Louis XVI looked to build upon his sudden maritime advantage.

Flushed with victory, the French turned their attention and their fleets south.

They were after an even greater prize, the very foundation of

Britain's imperial economy - her colonies in the Caribbean,

and their most precious commodity - sugar.

Barbados, St Lucia, Antigua and most importantly of all, Jamaica,

were the jewels in Britain's imperial crown.

These Caribbean islands were much more valuable than the 13 colonies

clinging to the eastern seaboard of North America.

Their lush soil and plenty of rainfall - they were home to the sugar plantations.

The lucrative sugar trade powered the British economy.

Slaves in the Caribbean harvested 80,000 tonnes of sugar each year.

Customs duties on this contributed the equivalent

of well over £250 million annually to the Treasury.

The British sweet tooth paid for the war effort.

King George III himself warned that, "If we lose our sugar islands,

"it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war.

"We must defend these islands,

"even at the risk of an invasion of Britain."

This site at Kenilworth in north west Jamaica

was a great sugar estate.

It stretched over 500 acres, and was one of hundreds of plantations

built along this coast so that their produce could easily be exported to Britain.

But Kenilworth's proximity to the sea also made it vulnerable.

Kenilworth wasn't just a sugar factory.

It was also by necessity a fortress,

and this is what remains of that 18th century gun battery.

This cannon pointed out to sea to stave off the threat of attack by pirates and privateers as well as

the French and Spanish navies, but never was the risk to this island

greater than in the spring of 1782.

On the 8th April, a French fleet of 36 warships,

accompanied by over 15,000 troops, set sail from Martinique.

Their commander, the Comte de Grasse, planned to

invade Jamaica's northern coast and grab the spoils for France.

De Grasse was so confident of victory that his fleet was accompanied by

a convoy of merchant ships,

their holds stuffed with trade goods to supply his new colony.

But Jamaica was just the beginning, the first step.

His plan was to drive the British entirely from the Caribbean

and destroy the British economy.

The future of Britain's transatlantic empire depended on

defending this coast, this island, from those French forces.

The task of protecting Jamaica fell to the Royal Navy's Caribbean fleet

and its recently upgraded but as yet untested copper-bottomed ships.

Their commander, Admiral Sir George Rodney, seemed a bit of a liability.

A gambler and a womaniser, he was deeply unpopular at the Admiralty.

But Rodney did have what it took to be an outstanding leader.

He'd joined the navy at just 14.

Since then he'd served 50 years, and in that half century he'd become

thoroughly imbued with the Royal Navy's aggressive ethos.

In battle, he was violent and single minded.

If anyone could save Jamaica, Rodney could.

On the 12th April at the Saints Islands, Rodney attacked.

Conditions were actually quite similar to those today.

The wind was very changeable and kept moving direction,

but this gave Rodney one key advantage.

His fleet was copper bottomed and much quicker and more manoeuvrable,

particularly in these light breeze conditions.

The French general, Antoine de Bougainville, the man who'd raced

Captain Cook across the Pacific, was now serving with de Grasse's fleet.

He was stunned by the speed and agility of the British ships.

Bougainville described the British advantage.

He said, "The French ships were like tortoises chasing British stags."

One British midshipman who fought at the Saints said,

"We knocked the French fleet to atoms.

"It was," he said, "the best day old England ever saw."

And after 11 hours of fighting, the French surrendered.

Their admiral, Comte de Grasse, conceded that his navy

was operating a full century behind the British.

Rodney had saved Jamaica and her precious sugar trade, the key stone of the British economy.

In the Jamaican capital, Kingston,

a giant marble statue was erected in his honour.

Here on the side, there's some fantastic detail.

Britannia here in the middle, with her union flag on the shield,

and at the very bottom, Britannia is trampling on the French flag.

You can see here the fleur-de-lis, symbol of the French monarchy.

It's fascinating to think what would have happened if de Grasse had won that battle.

Perhaps his statue would be up there now looking down on me.

Britain would almost certainly have lost her sugar islands and

all the trade with them that was such a mainstay of her economy.

But even more important than that, confidence, the great elixir

of the capitalist system, would have dried up.

The stock market would have collapsed,

and with it, the Government.

Britain would have been no better than a third-rate power.

Rodney's aggression was widely credited as

the reason for the preservation of Britain's Caribbean empire.

But he had an even greater edge over his rivals,

thanks to the efforts of a little known bureaucrat

working in a side street 3,000 miles away in the city of London.

Charles Middleton, the navy board controller.

The man who had the foresight and resolve to launch a copper revolution.

Global peace was restored in 1783.

Britain gave up her 13 colonies in North America,

but retained key possessions all across the globe,

including her vital Caribbean colonies.

Over the next 20 years, the revenues from imperial trade

trebled in value, with much of the profits re-invested in a rejuvenated Royal Navy.

The French king, Louis XVI,

had failed in his attempt to dismember the British Empire,

and he'd pay for it with his head.

In chasing his dream of defeating the Royal Navy,

Louis bankrupted his kingdom.

France was torn apart by revolution

and on the 21st January 1793, he was executed as a traitor.

Within days, the new Republic of France

had declared war on Britain for the sixth time in 100 years.

But this time, their aim was to eradicate the British state.

A year after war was declared, a vicar, James Hurdis, made his way to

St Andrew's Church in Bishopstone, Sussex, for a Sunday service.

Hurdis was no typical country cleric.

He was an Oxford professor and an ardent anti-republican, who believed

it was his patriotic duty to give political guidance to his flock.

And he used a particular naval allusion to do it.

Hurdis asked his congregation to imagine that Britain

was a ship of war, and they, the British people, were her crew.

The ship would operate effectively if they did as they were told by

their senior officers and respected their superiors.

But, he warned, if they should all conceive themselves to be equal

and each to be guided by his own will,

then the ship would change its course and they must be wrecked.

He went on to say that if they deposed the captain in a mutiny,

then they would instantly divide and fall asunder.

To his audience, the symbolism was clear.

Across the Channel in France, the Reign of Terror was in full swing.

Thousands of enemies of the state had followed Louis XVI to the guillotine.

The congregation listening to Hurdis here would have been filled with

a fear of French republican terror, and his solution was that they unite

behind traditional values -

respect for church and king, parliament and law.

It was a call to arms.

Hurdis's sermon struck a chord with the people of Bishopstone.

Their parish was just a mile inland from the English Channel.

And if the Royal Navy was defeated at sea,

they'd be on the front line when the French invaded.

Britain had faced invasion from France countless times before,

but this time would be different.

This wouldn't just be a physical conquest, a bit of regime change,

a subtle exchange of one group of politicians for another.

This time it was ideological.

At stake was nothing less than the entire British way of life.

The fear of French invasion quickly spread across the country,

and, faced with utter destruction,

Britons looked yet again to their navy for salvation.

The British public were well used to paying for their navy.

Now, if Britain was to preserve her national security, they'd have to man it too.

The fleet had expanded to more than 1,000 ships,

and the biggest required crews of up to 900 skilled men.

Commodore Nelson explained the extent of the problem to his brother, William.

"I've only got a few men and very hard indeed are they to be got," he said.

The Admiralty embraced a solution that it had used so often

in wars of the past, and that's legalised kidnapping.

For centuries, the Government had sanctioned the use of so-called press gangs.

These groups of armed men now roamed the country

looking for sailors to send to sea without their own consent.

This was a practice that didn't really sit well with

Britain's reputation as the home of personal liberty,

but it was the only sure way of manning the fleet.

In the Bodleian library in Oxford,

the archive holds a collection of the Gentleman's Magazine, a monthly

publication which often carried stories about press gang activity.

I found one here that's a case heard by the Old Bailey,

about a Mr William Godfrey, who's a citizen and "cooper", or barrel-maker of London.

It says that this particular lawless body of sailors burst into his house

in open defiance of the law, seized him, knocked him down and dragged

him through the streets of London with only one of his slippers on.

And then there's the wedding party that turns into a huge brawl

as a press gang tried to grab the groom.

Luckily, he and his new wife managed to escape.

And there's the man who was torn from his carriage on his way home.

On another occasion it says that after some particularly vigorous

press gang activity, the River Thames was swept clean of mariners.

The press gang clearly looms large in the popular imagination of the 18th century,

but despite some of the scare stories, it wasn't total anarchy.

Most press gangs operated only in ports.

Their mission was to try and press merchant seamen, men who knew their way around a tall ship.

It was in no-one's interest to fill ships up with a bunch of landsmen -

people that had never been to sea before.

They'd be a danger to themselves and the rest of the crew.

And in fact most sailors were pressed when they were out at sea,

when their ships were intercepted by the press gang in small boats.

They were seized before they'd set foot on dry land.

At the height of the war, almost 40% of crews were pressed into service.

Although widely criticised, impressment did boost naval

man power to 140,000 sailors, seven times its peace time level.

This was just as well, because the Royal Navy was now outgunned at sea.

In February 1797, a British force of 15 ships sailed south along

Portugal's Atlantic coast, searching for a Spanish convoy.

A few months earlier, Spain had joined forces with France to wage war against Britain.

The commander of the British fleet was Admiral John Jervis,

and this ship, HMS Victory, was his flagship.

For sometime, he'd been waiting off the coast of Portugal,

hoping to intercept the Spanish, but terrible storms

had made it impossible for him to track them down.

Then on 13th February 1797, a new ship arrived to reinforce Jervis.

On board was a senior officer with some vital information.

That officer was Horatio Nelson.

In 25 years of service,

he'd earned a reputation as an impulsive, aggressive leader.

"It is my disposition," he wrote,

"that dangers do but increase my idea of attempting them."

Now, Nelson would prove his words with action.

The night before reaching HMS Victory, Nelson had, by chance,

sailed right through the Spanish fleet at nearby Cape St Vincent.

Armed with this intelligence,

the British had the advantage of surprise.

Early the next morning, they attacked.

The noise down here on the gun deck during battle would have been extraordinary.

The men's ears bled, some were deafened for the rest of their lives.

Just one enemy cannon ball coming through these wooden walls could kill an entire gun crew.

The deck was sprinkled with sand to soak up the blood but, within minutes of battle being joined, it

was strewn with severed limbs, torsos and other unidentifiable human remains.

It's no surprise that the men who fought down here called it the slaughterhouse.

Amid the smoke and chaos, Nelson spotted an opportunity

and he would never look back.

Without waiting for orders, Nelson spun his ship round and tore into the heart of the enemy fleet.

Once he was there, he drove it alongside a Spanish vessel and roaring,

"Westminster Abbey, oh, glorious victory!"

he led his crew armed with cutlasses and pistols onto the enemy deck.

He managed to capture that ship and the one next to it.

Taking two enemy vessels like this was a unique achievement.

Before the battle of Cape St Vincent,

Nelson was considered just one of a gifted generation of sailors.

But after, he'd marked himself out as someone exceptional,

a daring leader with confidence and abilities beyond his contemporaries.

Now Nelson showed that he didn't just have a flair for combat, but also self-publicity.

He immediately sought out an author called Colonel Drinkwater,

who was travelling with the fleet, to make a record of any fighting.

He made sure that Drinkwater was well aware of his heroics.

By the time he returned back to Britain, he decided to write a rather dramatic account of the

battle, which he modestly called A Few Remarks Relative To Myself.

A copy of this was hand delivered to the King and it appeared in two

popular newspapers, True Britain and The Sun.

Nelson was front page news.

For the Admiralty, Nelson's heroics were a godsend,

some good PR to lift the morale of a war weary nation.

By the summer of 1798, Britain faced economic disaster.

The war was being fought on a scale never before seen.

Through its course, the government would spend a staggering £1,657 million on defence.

A tenfold increase on peacetime military expenditure

and the equivalent of over £100 billion today.

Taxes had to be raised time and again.

The political satirist, James Gillray, condemned the financial burden.

In his cartoon, The Friend Of The People,

a tax collector is shown knocking on the door of a modest British home.

"Taxes, taxes, taxes", bemoans the owner, "how am I to get money to pay them all?"

But it still wasn't enough.

In the parliamentary archive in the House of Lords, there is a remarkable document revealing the

government's radical response to the growing fiscal crisis.

In 1799, Parliament passed an act designed to raise revenue and in typically flowery language,

the preamble explains what they intended to do.

"That we, your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects,

do voluntarily grant your Majesty several rates and duties."

It was a new tax, designed to be just a temporary measure to help

pay for the war and fund the Army and the Navy.

It was called income tax.

From 1799, every British subject earning more than £60 a year

was charged income tax at a rate of 10 per cent.

Here at the end of the Act is the first example of a tax return,

listing all the types of income to be taxed, from property, rent and employment.

This document is such a fascinating reminder of the way in which this war of unprecedented

cost and intensity was revolutionising British life.

In industry, commerce and now here in finance and, of course,

we're still living with the legacy of this act in the present day.

In its first year, income tax raised £6 million towards the war effort,

enough to build 100 warships.

Income tax, like impressment, was highly contentious,

but its impact was felt way beyond Westminster.

At sea, the Royal Navy entered the most critical phase of the war in rude health.

Fully funded and well manned.

It was the high tide of British naval power.

Dominant on the seas of Europe, the Navy began a campaign of

attrition, designed to crush the enemy's trade and morale.

From 1803, major French and Spanish ports were blockaded, encircled by the fleet's wooden walls.

It was a highly effective strategy.

While the British trained at sea, the enemy were trapped in harbour, impotent and immobile.

Here in Cadiz in autumn 1805, a Franco-Spanish force

of 33 warships was tied up in ports, its commanders desperate to break out of the Navy stranglehold.

But a few miles out to sea, Admiral Nelson was waiting for them with a fleet of 27 heavily armed warships.

Aboard the flagship, HMS Victory, Nelson summoned his senior officers

to his cabin to discuss the battle plan.

What he called "The Nelson Touch."

Nelson's plan was confident and aggressive, but it was also risky.

He was going to divide his ships up and send them right at the heart of the enemy.

This, he hoped, would break up their formation and provoke the kind of anarchic melee that he desired.

He wanted his captains to use their initiative in selecting their targets, but he told them,

"No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy."

One on one, he was certain that his ships would prevail.

Nelson knew that he was outnumbered and outgunned, but he also knew that

he commanded the finest naval weapon of the age of sail.

A combination of men, ships and cannon that had been

honed to the point of perfection over more than 200 years and this

was the moment that Nelson was going to use that weapon to annihilate Britain's greatest enemies.

On the 19th of October, the enemy attempted to break out of the blockade.

Two days later, the British caught up with them, near Cape Trafalgar.

An able seaman serving on board HMS Victory

said the sight cheered the heart of every British sailor.

He described the men around him as being like lions, anxious to be at it.

The Battle of Trafalgar has seared itself into the national psyche.

In the Royal Gallery at the House of Lords a vast

fresco commemorates the battle in the very heart of government.

It measures almost 15 metres wide.

This gigantic fresco shows the quarterdeck of HMS Victory, Nelson's

flagship, at the very climax of the Battle of Trafalgar and it's locked

in single combat with the French warship, The Redoubtable, which you can just see in the background.

The Victory and the French ship were so close together

their rigging became entangled so they couldn't part from each other.

The Victory's gun crews couldn't even wheel out their cannons to their full extent.

They were touching the hull of the French ship.

There are men here suffering from musket wounds and terrible jagged wounds from splinters that would

have spiralled, cart wheeled through the air as cannon balls carved into the oak decks of the ship.

In many ways, the first half of the Battle of Trafalgar, the forgotten half, is the blockade of Cadiz.

The Spanish and French ships rotting at their moorings, their crews unable to train,

to go through their gunnery practise like, like the British.

Yellow fever broke out, they had scurvy, and perhaps most of all, the depression, the malaise that

came from being bottled up in port, knowing that you couldn't go out to sea

because a far superior British fleet was waiting for you.

In just four hours of fighting, highly drilled crews on HMS Victory fired more than 3,000 cannon balls.

They fired so fast that one French sailor claimed, "The devil loaded their guns."

The Royal Navy crews were tough veterans that had spent years

sailing the Mediterranean, the Atlantic.

They'd gone through these drills hundreds of times,

they'd fired these guns thousands of times,

they knew exactly what they were doing and they were able to keep doing their jobs

in the most hideous, destructive environment imaginable.

What you can see here are actually the rhythms and the discipline of

the Royal Navy working, despite coming under tremendous stress from enemy fire.

At around 4.30pm the cannons fell silent.

Britain had secured an overwhelming victory.

But as the Royal Navy celebrated, news began to spread of a terrible loss.

In the very centre of the painting lies Admiral Nelson.

He's just been fatally wounded by a shot fired by a sniper

who was perched high in the rigging of The Redoubtable.

The shot had shattered his left shoulder, entered his body,

cut his spinal column and is slowly filling his chest cavity with blood.

The man who'd begun his naval career as a young midshipman, rowing past HMS Victory

34 year before in Chatham, was now lying mortally wounded on her oak deck.

All positions where possible set watch on Charlie group.

Today, Nelson is remembered as the greatest commander in naval history.

So would the consequences of his death be disastrous for Britain and her Navy?

Well, no...

Nelson had inherited a fleet that was an unparalleled military machine

and his death had little impact on it.

The powerful ships, the well trained crews and the spirit of aggression and ambition all lived on.

The commander of the Channel fleets, Admiral Cornwallis,

described the true foundations of Nelson's greatness.

"Everything seemed as if by enchantment to prosper under his direction," he said.

"But it was the effect of system not of chance."

At Trafalgar, the Navy's band of brothers had paved the way for France's ultimate defeat in 1815.

Safeguarding Britain's independence and her identity.

Thanks to the Navy, Britain had decisively won the greatest war in her history and proved

that no land empire, no matter how powerful or large, could ever defeat a nation that dominated the sea.

The sea was the true source of wealth and power and to control it was to control the world.

Next time, Nelson's victory gave the Navy mastery of the seas, but in time, new challenges and new enemies

would take Britain to the very brink of disaster.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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