Trafalgar - Roy Adkins

`It is necessary for us to be masters of the sea for six hours only, and England will have ceased to exist' Napoleon Bonaparte, June 1805
Just four months later something very different was to happen: Britain, under Nelson, mastered the sea for the six hours of the Battle of Trafalgar, annihilating her French and Spanish opponents. This resounding victory paved the way towards Napoleon's defeat, a decade later, at Waterloo. But at Trafalgar, Britain lost her greatest maritime commander.
In Trafalgar: The Biography o f a Battle, Roy Adkins embraces the battle, its prelude and its aftermath, in a narrative that is at once scholarly and breathtakingly exciting. This was the great deciding conflict of the Napoleonic Wars - one that Adkins describes, with the use of many newly published first-hand accounts, in mesmerising, blow-by-blow detail. He evokes a smoke-hazed, claustrophobic world where sixty ships fought at terrifyingly close quarters, where cannon-balls splintered through wooden walls with deafening noise, where searing heat scalded the gun-deck and the surgeon's cockpit became a'vision of hell'. Nelson, though heavily outnumbered, directed this theatre of war from the outset and, with his calculated risk-taking, changed the course of history.
Charting a magisterial route through the mass
of contradictory accounts that subsequently appeared, Adkins also describes the scenes of jubilant celebration that followed the triumph
of battle, and the hysterical mourning that greeted the tragedy of Nelson's death. Thirty thousand people besieged his coffin, yet an infinitely greater number were affected by Nelson's most lasting legacy - the removal of the threat of invasion of England and Britain's expansion into the largest empire the world has ever seen.

£20.00