Salons in the Queen's House: Victory at all costs

This talk will take place in the Headmaster's Drawing Room and Dining Room, located on the ground floor of the Queen's House. It is part of a series of talks responding to the themes of J.M.W. Turner's The Battle of Trafalgar, which has recently been installed in the room.

By 26 October 1805, five days after Nelson’s flagship first made contact with the enemy fleets at Trafalgar, 23 French and Spanish ships and over 1,000 cannon lay at the bottom of the Atlantic. They were victims both of the superiority of the Royal Navy, and a storm that devastated the British attempts to bring home their prizes. In the face of the immense human tragedy that Turner so effectively demonstrates, the loss of these wooden walls seems insignificant. The cost to the nations involved, and to the British sailors who had fought to save them, however, was immense.

This talk will explore both the process of constructing the warships of the Napoleonic era, as well as the economics and logistics of maintaining a fleet that could meet an enemy at a moment’s notice. In outlining the true costs of these immense machines, it will show how the capture of enemy ships, and the subsequent distribution of the prize money from their sale, played a significant role in battles such as Trafalgar.

Fern Aldous is the Assistant Curator of Maritime Technology at the National Maritime Museum. Her area of interest is in ship design and construction from the classical world through to the Napoleonic era and the process of representing ships in plans and models.