3-101-842 - Ware in the World/Heritage Images

Page from the HMS Victory logbook, Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, (c1955). The Battle of Trafalgar was fought between the Royal Navy and a combined fleet of the French and Spanish navies during the War of the Third Coalition. As part of Napoleon's planned invasion of the United Kingdom, the French and Spanish navies planned to take control of the English Channel and provide the French invasion army with safe passage to Britain. The allied fleet, under the command of French Vice-admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve, sailed from the port of Cádiz in southern Spain on 18 October 1805. It encountered a British fleet under Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson in the Atlantic Ocean along the southwest coast of Spain off Cape Trafalgar. The Famous Signal: the handwritten text in the official master log of HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship, records that at about 11:45 am, his famous telegraph message to his men was sent: "England expects that every man will do his duty." The signal was relayed using the numeric flag code known as the Telegraphic Signals of Marine Vocabulary.