Product Description
PRAISE FOR TRAFALGAR:‘The battle is grippingly described with a Master and Commander/Patrick O’Brian touch.’ Daily Mail‘You can almost smell the whiff of gunsmoke and feel the sweat on both sides as the battle begins. This is history with a page-turning quality.’ Good Book Guide‘Nicholas Best uses eyewitness accounts to recreate the tension and uncertainty of the campaign that led to the battle, and to describe the carnage and the glory of Trafalgar itself.’ Church Times‘None is likely to be more comprehensive or gripping than this one . . . He is unsparing in his details of the bloodshed wrought by cannons and cutlass-wielding seamen who boarded the shattered ships.’ Birmingham Post‘This book is replete with fascinating details.’ Glasgow Evening TimesBoulogne, 1805. Napoleon stands on the cliffs and studies Dover through a giant telescope. Behind him waits the finest army the world has ever seen — 167,000 men, drilled to perfection and impatient to be gone. Behind them stands Fouché, his Minister of Police, who likes to attend executions with a pair of human ears dangling from his hat. Only twenty-one miles of grey water lie between the Grand Army and its prize.On the far shore, William Pitt drills his Cinque Port Volunteers — three thousand yokels armed, to begin with, largely with pikes and pitchforks. Between the two, desperately short of ships and men, sails the Royal Navy, and one small, one-armed admiral who has never learned how to lose.For more than a year the fleets circle one another across the Atlantic and back, until at last, on the morning of 21 October, they meet off Cape Trafalgar. By nightfall the combined navies of France and Spain have been destroyed, Britain has been saved from invasion, and Nelson lies dead below the waterline of his own flagship.Nicholas Best tells the whole extraordinary story in the words of those who were there — admirals and powder monkeys, prime ministers and prostitutes, spies, surgeons and sharpshooters of every nation.From the throne of Dagobert to the blood-slick gun decks, from Madame Forty Thousand Men to the marksman in the rigging, here is the most famous battle in naval history as its own participants lived it: minute by minute, and to the last dying breath. Read more
