Читать книгу Champions of the Fleet. Captains and men-of-war and days that helped to make the empire онлайн

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While fighting the San Juan—the San Juan Nepomuceno, a Spanish seventy-four—the Dreadnought had to keep off two other Spaniards and a Frenchman at the same time; Admiral Gravina’s flagship, the Principe de Asturias, of 112 guns, and the San Justo and Indomptable, two seventy-fours. The San Juan in the end proved an easy prize, for she had been already severely mauled by some of Collingwood’s leading ships. On being run alongside of she gave in quickly. Without staying to take possession, the Dreadnought pushed on to close with the big Principe de Asturias, and gave her several broadsides, one shot from which mortally wounded Admiral Gravina. The Spanish three-decker, however, managed to disengage, and made off, to lead the escaping ships in their flight for Cadiz. Thus the Dreadnought was baulked of her big prize.

It was the Trafalgar Dreadnought that gave the name to that great international institution, the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital, at Greenwich. This, of course, was long after Trafalgar, for the “wooden whopper of the Thames,” as Dickens called the old three-decker in her old age, did not make her appearance off Greenwich until a quarter of a century later. The fine old veteran of “Eighteen Hundred and War Time,” lasted until 1857, and to the end they preserved on board as the special relic of interest, “a piece of glass from a cabin skylight scrawled over, with somebody’s diamond ring, with the names of those officers who were in her at Trafalgar.” Another old three-decker replaced the Trafalgar ship until 1870, when the institution was removed on shore. At Chatham to-day, in the dockyard museum, visitors may see the Dreadnought’s bell which was on board the old ship during the battle, and was removed from her when the Dreadnought was broken up. Yet another memento of the Trafalgar Dreadnought exists in the Eton eight-oar Dreadnought, one of the “Lower Boats,” and so-called originally, together with the boat that bears the name Victory, in honour of Nelson and Trafalgar.