Every Royal Navy sailor has heard the story. After Trafalgar, Nelson’s body came home in a barrel of rum. On the way, the crew drilled a hole in the barrel and sipped the rum through straws. When the barrel was opened in England, it was nearly dry. Navy rum has been called “Nelson’s Blood” ever since, and a sly drink from the ship’s spirit is “tapping the Admiral.”
The man who actually sealed the barrel wrote down what he did. His account does not match.
1:15pm, October 21, 1805
At about a quarter past one, a musket ball fired from the mizzen-top of the French 74 Redoutable hit Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson on HMS Victory’s quarterdeck. The two ships were locked together, close enough for marksmen in the French rigging to pick out officers below.
The ball went in at the left shoulder. Victory’s surgeon, William Beatty, later traced its path: through the left lung, cutting a large branch of the pulmonary artery, through the spine, and to rest about two inches below the right shoulder blade.
Nelson was carried below to the cockpit. He knew what it meant. He told Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy not to throw him overboard and kept repeating, “Thank God, I have done my duty.” He died at 4:30pm, about three hours and a quarter after he was shot, with the battle won.
Victory paid for it too. The National Museum of the Royal Navy puts her Trafalgar crew at 821. Of those, 51 were killed in action, 11 died of their wounds and 91 more were wounded and lived. Other counts say 57 killed and 102 wounded. Nobody agrees on the exact figure, which is normal for a ship that had just been raked at point-blank range.
The leaguer
Nelson had asked not to be thrown overboard. That meant the body had to survive weeks at sea first.
Beatty picked a leaguer, the largest kind of water cask on board. He stripped the body to its shirt, put it in the cask and filled it with brandy. Not rum. Brandy was stronger, and strength was the whole point. Beatty also had the cask fitted with an opening at the top and another at the bottom, so old spirit could be drawn off below and fresh poured in above.
Then a sentry was posted over it.
On October 24, three days after the battle, the sentry got the fright of his life. Gas from the body built up in the cask and started to force its way out. Beatty’s dry report says only that the sentry was “alarmed” and that the cask was “spiled,” meaning a small vent was drilled to let the air escape. Later retellings have the lid blowing off. Beatty does not say that.
Gibraltar to Spithead
The battered Victory put into Gibraltar, where the cask needed topping up. His report does not mention anyone drinking from it.
At Gibraltar the ship took on spirits of wine, a purer alcohol than brandy. On the way home the cask was drained and refilled twice, about two parts brandy to one part spirits of wine.
The passage took nearly five weeks, and it was December 4 before she anchored at Spithead, off Portsmouth. On December 11 Beatty finally took the body out of the cask and did a full post-mortem.
He found the ball in Nelson’s back. Stuck to it was a piece of gold lace and the pad of the admiral’s epaulette, carried in from the coat. Beatty had the ball set in a silver locket under glass and wore it, the story goes, for the rest of his life. After his death in 1842 it went to Queen Victoria.
Nelson’s body did not go back into the brandy cask. It went into a lead coffin, filled with brandy with camphor and myrrh dissolved in it. That went inside a wooden coffin made from the mainmast of the French flagship L’Orient, which blew up at the Nile in 1798. Captain Benjamin Hallowell had given it to Nelson as a present after the Nile.
Victory carried him round to the Nore, arriving December 23. He lay in state at Greenwich from January 4 to 7, 1806, and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral on January 9, under a black marble sarcophagus first made for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.
So who drank the Admiral?
Probably nobody. The etymologist Michael Quinion found that “tapping the Admiral” turns up in the Royal Navy only in the late 19th century, decades after Trafalgar. The rum version of the tale gets the drink wrong. And Beatty, writing in 1807, describes the cask being drained and refilled on purpose, under a sentry, with no word of theft. If sailors were drinking from it, they were doing it past a guard for six weeks.
None of that has hurt the story at all. A crew drinking their dead admiral is much better than a surgeon topping up a barrel with spirits of wine, so the crew version won. Sailors still call navy rum Nelson’s Blood.
She is still in commission
Victory was launched at Chatham on May 7, 1765. She was already 40 at Trafalgar, an old ship by the standards of the day. She carried 104 guns on a 227-foot hull and displaces about 3,500 tons. Royal Museums Greenwich says more than 2,000 oak trees went into her; the National Museum of the Royal Navy says about 6,000. She cost £63,176. In 1922 she went into dry dock at Portsmouth for good. King George V opened her to the public in 1928.
She never left the Navy. Victory is the oldest commissioned warship in the world, about 30 years older than USS Constitution, which holds the title for ships still afloat. Since October 2012 she has been the flagship of the First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Royal Navy.
You can visit her at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, a short walk from the hall that holds what is left of the Mary Rose. The ball, still in its locket with the scrap of gold lace, is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Victory had better luck than Sweden’s Vasa, which sank in Stockholm harbor within minutes of setting sail in 1628.
