I bounced into the Sharpe series because my previous “ship” (the Aubrey-Maturin series) had landed. But with Sharpe’s Trafalgar, I find myself afloat with a fictional Napoleonic-era English warrior once more. How does the amry hero conveniently end up in the biggest naval battle of the century? Bernard Cornwell wrote on his website:
Sharpe has to go home from India, and he would have left in 1805 and Cape Trafalgar lies on his way home, so why should he not be there at the right time?
Despite my, ahem, education, I knew surprisingly little about Trafalgar, beyond the basic fact that it was a smashing victory for the English fleet. Neither Hornblower nor Aubrey sailed with Nelson in that action, so even my fictional education lacks. Learning about Trafalgar from Cornwell was like learning about enclosure from O’Brian’s Yellow Admiral. Sharpe’s Trafalgar leads with a diagram of the fleet action, and most of the book is just an excuse to get Sharpe on a warship instead of one of the East Indies ships. What is remarkable in retrospect is how slowly the inevitable occurs: once the English fleet had the weather gage, and the decision to enter into battle was made, it took hours for the battle to start and 20 or more minutes before the English could return fire due to their angle of attack. Ouch. Quite a reminder that technology speeds things up, even if the scale of the slaughter was probably not matched afloat until World War II.