A “pell-mell battle” was how Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson predicted the British would triumph at Trafalgar. And on 21 October 1805, as they attacked the combined Spanish and French fleets off the coast of Cádiz, he achieved exactly that. Going against the grain of traditional naval warfare, Nelson split his ships into two parallel lines. His plan was simple: HMS Victory, his flagship, leading the windward column, was to smash through the middle of the French lines, while the other column would rout the enemy’s rear. It worked perfectly, but at a terrible cost. Victory lost 51 of her 821 crew during the battle (11 others later died from their wounds), including Nelson himself. The ship, too, very nearly succumbed. Cannon fire pockmarked the hull.

At one stage, says Andrew Baines, an executive director at the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN), she was flooding at a rate of one foot of water every hour. Only her sturdy build – with more than 2,000 English oak trees used to construct her hull alone – somehow kept her afloat. After being towed to Gibraltar for repairs, HMS Victory returned to Britain that December, bearing Nelson’s body on board.

Nearly 220 years after the battle, HMS Victory is being restored in a £45 million project led by the NMRN in Portsmouth. However, it would no doubt surprise her former commander, who once described the French as “thieves, murderers, oppressors and infidels”, that Britain has been forced to turn to the old enemy to supply the ship’s wood. Restorers require about 200 high-grade oak planks on either side of the hull, which are up to 12 metres long. Despite scouring the British countryside, they have not been able to find anything suitable. Instead, the team expects to source the bulk from France. “There is a certain irony to it,” Baines admits.

Original link