Trafalgar

Two hundred years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte dominated Europe and threatened Britain with invasion. Against him stood the Royal Navy and the already legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson. On 21 October 1805 a massive naval battle off Cape Trafalgar on the coast of Spain decided mastery of the seas. Then, over the following days and nights, the battleships and their exhausted crews endured a gale of awesome fury. As Captain Charles Tyler wrote to his wife Margaret, 'the wind blew a perfect storm'. "Trafalgar" takes readers from the claustrophobic turmoil of a gun-deck in battle, to the desperation of men pumping water from sinking hulks adrift in hurricane force winds. Having fought in the most confused and bloody naval conflict that any had known, English, American, Irish, Spanish and French seamen then had to endure a terrifying combination of weather and circumstances - the stuff of every mariner's nightmare. Intriguing characters abound: Geannette, wife of a Flemish 'main topman'; Louis Infernet, propelled to success by the French Revolution; Dionisio Galiano , sailor, scientist and explorer of the New World, and many more. The demands of life at sea - and what this extraordinary mix of people had suffered and achieved in the turbulent years that led up to Trafalgar - make compelling reading.