Trafalgar 200 - World's Largest Ship Review


Portsmouth, United Kingdom




Highlights of the day– Tuesday 28th June 2005

13:00 Her Majesty The Queen commences her formal review of the International Fleet off Southsea
17:30 Air Display starts
18:00 Tall ships position for battle
19:00 First part of the show begins
19:30 Nelson joins his Fleet
21:20 Let battle commence
22:10 Firework finale
22:30 Grand lighting of the Fleet

Ships from over 36 of the world's navies are taking part in the International Fleet Review at the invitation of the Royal Navy.

A truly international celebration of the sea, which brings together so many navies in friendship, this is a review of ships from around the world on a truly grand scale - a treat for anyone who loves amazing spectacle.

A unique range of sea vessels - everything from romantic tall ships of yesteryear to powerful warships of today will fill the waters of the eastern Solent.

This will be history in the making and a rare event that goes back 600 years - 1977 was the last major Fleet Review.

You'll love every moment of this very special and atmospheric start to Trafalgar 200.
Event highlights

* A huge variety of powerful warships.
* The elegance of the world's finest tall ships.
* Aircraft and helicopters in thrilling flypasts.
* Merchant ships, racing and cruising yachts, fishing boats and family and work-boats – a dramatic reminder of the importance of the sea in our lives.

On the same day the Son et Lumière will be staged on the water illustrating a sea battle from Nelson's time.




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I'm going to pop down to Lee-on-Solent or Gosport to have a look at this tomorrow. Should have a great view from there!

Watch the review LIVE here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/default.stm#




http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/uk_enl_1119893697/img/1.jpg




Thousands of spectators are expected in Portsmouth as a massive international fleet review gets under way to mark the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

The Queen will review 167 naval and merchant vessels and tall ships from 35 countries, watched by an expected 250,000 onlookers.

It will be followed by a mock Napoleonic sea battle in the Solent.

The day is part of a string of celebrations marking the 1805 British victory over France and Spain.

The re-enactment of the battle will be held between a blue and a red team, rather than Britain versus France, in order not to offend the French.

Admiral Nelson's great, great, great granddaughter on Monday said that was "political correctness" and "pretty stupid".

"I am sure the French and Spanish are adult enough to appreciate we did win that battle," Anna Tribe, 75, said.

But the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Alan West, said: "Nelson would have absolutely approved of what's going on this year, and I think Anna hasn't looked at the totality of what's going on."

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the involvement of ships from 35 nations reflected "the way we are employed around the world now, fighting terrorism, working with our close allies".

"And Nelson would have approved of that, to get the maritime back in the public eye."

The event follows a long tradition of reviews of the fleet at the Spithead mooring off Portsmouth, dating back to medieval times. The last was in 1977 to mark the Queen's Silver Jubilee.

Ships have been arriving for the review for days, along with thousands of spectator yachts, which have moored near the review site in the hope of getting a good view.

The vessels, including the French flagship Charles de Gaulle, several aircraft carriers, six nuclear-powered warships, and Dame Ellen MacArthur's record-breaking yacht B&Q, are lined up at the Spithead mooring in the Solent, with between 25,000 and 30,000 sailors on board.

The Queen, who is Britain's Lord High Admiral, arrives at the Royal Naval base at 1100 BST, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh.

At 1130 BST she will embark on board the polar survey ship, HMS Endurance, which will carry her throughout the review.

She will be greeted by a 21-gun salute from HMS Chatham, before setting sail for Spithead.

The Queen will have lunch on board before the review officially starts at 1300 BST.

Endurance will sail up and down the lines of anchored vessels allowing the Queen to inspect them from a specially constructed viewing platform.

As she passes each ship, she will be saluted by its crew.

It is expected to take around two hours for the Queen to pass all the ships, after which Endurance will stop at the head of the fleet.

At about 1515 BST there will be a steam-past of five warships.

This will be followed by a sail-past of tall ships, a fly-past of planes including harriers and tornados and a sail-past of yachts and small craft.

After the formal review, the tall ships will weigh anchor and move to their positions for the period battle enactment off Southsea.

As they sail, there will be an air display by the Red Arrows and other planes.

The Queen will transfer to HMS Invincible for a reception.

The evening's spectacle starts at 2000 BST, when an actor playing the part of Admiral Nelson, who lost his life at Trafalgar, will go on board the tall ship the Grand Turk, a replica 19th Century frigate.

The ship will play the part of Nelson's historic flagship Victory during the battle.

It will be one of 17 historic ships from five countries involved in the spectacle, which aims to illustrate how sea battles were fought in the era of Nelson and Napoleon.

The real HMS Victory is nearby in dry dock in Portsmouth.

At 2100 BST, the battle will begin, accompanied by a dramatic sound and light show, against the backdrop of the modern ships assembled for the fleet review.

During the battle, the death of Nelson will be enacted on board the Grand Turk.

It will be followed by a huge fireworks display, representing a massive storm which struck after the end of the 1805 battle.

Finally, the modern ships of the review will be illuminated in a dramatic display.

Trafalgar commemoration 'watered down' to avoid offence to Spain, France

PORTSMOUTH, England, June 28 (AFP) - The 200th anniversary events of Britain's naval victory over the French and Spanish at the Battle of Trafalgar are "watered down" to avoid upsetting allies, its organiser admitted Tuesday.

Peter Workman, chairman of the International Festival of the Sea, said his plans for the events involving a multinational fleet off southern England had not developed in the hands of contractors as he would have wanted.

"If I'd have done it properly we'd have just called it Trafalgar and said that's it, but it's got a little bit watered down," he told AFP by telephone from a Thames river barge off the coast of Portsmouth.

Navy officers earlier denied charges of "political correctness" from those who scoffed at plans to re-enact skirmishes later Tuesday involving "red" and "blue" teams of tall ships without explicit national symbols.

"It's a shame not to be more up front with everything," Workman said.

"It is one of those things where people were a little bit too sensitive to what the French might feel about it. This is a period in history where sensitivity is to the fore," he said.

"This is a shared experience: there were heroes on every side at Trafalgar," which was fought on October 21, 1805 off the southern coast of Spain, he said.

The sound and light show off the Portsmouth coast promises to be spectacular, using a blaze of cannon, smoke and fireworks to recreate "a Nelson-era battle."

Some 17 tall ships from five different nations will take part, ending in a massive pyrotechnic display to represent the great storm that beset both fleets after the original battle.

"What is going to take place is not the Battle of Trafalgar. A lot of it is as much of Trafalgar as can be achieved," Workman said.

"It will be an extra-ordinarily exciting extravaganza on the water. It is pure theatre with a hell of a lot of action and explosions."

Workman admitted the furore over "red" and "blue" teams may have worked in his favour.

"It led to a lot more coverage than it would have done," he added.

Captain Steve Bramley, Royal Navy director of marketing and publicity, denied a full-scale recreation would have been possible in any case.

"We haven't got that number of ships. The real battle was well over 70 ships. There's not the sea room and there's no way we could recreate the conditions," he told a press launch earlier this month.

Watch the Battle of Trafalgar re-enacted and the immense fireworks:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/#




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Here's INS Tarangini from India.

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/NAVY/Articles/Article12.jpg

And INS Mumbai

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/NAVY/Images/Delhi12.jpg

What a waste of money! Hopefully Spain will win the future battle of Gibraltar...

I dont think it was a waste of Money....and remember not one penny of the cost came from tax payers money, But from corporate sponsors.

'What a waste of money! Hopefully Spain will win the future battle of Gibraltar'

Exsqueeze me?!

But seeing as Britain have never lost a battle at sea, I doubt Spain or anyone would beat us.

Exsqueeze me?!

But seeing as Britain have never lost a battle at sea, I doubt Spain or anyone would beat us.

http://www.regiamarina.net/xa_mas/alexandria/alexandria_us.htm

http://www.mynotebookstore.com/articles/Battle_of_Coronel

http://ahoy.tk-jk.net/macslog/TheSinkingofBritishBattle.html

Seeing as we've never lost a war at see.....

;)


They were just scuffles anyway....not real battles, Didny change anything :p

^ bah, these are the only i found looking 20 seconds on google...may be there are other defeats ;)

I doubt it, Not Britain, Not us, they were freaks I tell ya.....Britannia rules the waves....Didny ya hear.

pictures found

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/uk_trafalgar_200/img/4.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/uk_trafalgar_200/img/6.jpg
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/uk_trafalgar_200/img/1.jpg

I dont think it was a waste of Money....and remember not one penny of the cost came from tax payers money, But from corporate sponsors.

'What a waste of money! Hopefully Spain will win the future battle of Gibraltar'

Exsqueeze me?!

But seeing as Britain have never lost a battle at sea, I doubt Spain or anyone would beat us.

:rofl: :rofl:

U-boats, Bismarck, Tirpitz, Graaf Spee, doesn't ring the bell. I guess not, cause I guess you don't know much.

Spain, Britain, France mark bicentennial of historic sea battle
By HAROLD HECKLE
Associated Press Writer
21 October 2005

CADIZ, Spain (AP) - Descendants of sailors who fought in the battle of Trafalgar joined military leaders from France, Spain and Britain on Friday to mark the 200th anniversary of the last great naval confrontation of the age of sail.

A solitary bell tolled as representatives of the three navies involved in the battle read out the names of the 60 ships that blasted one another with cannon and musket fire not far from this port city in southwestern Spain. Sailors, soldiers and clergy paid homage in the seaside park to the more than 7,000 dead.

The battle on Oct. 21, 1805, in which Britain's Adm. Horatio Nelson defeated Napoleon Bonaparte's combined French and Spanish fleets, was one of the defining naval confrontations in history.

Spanish Defense Minister Jose Bono led a religious service at a naval base, and descendants of the fleet commanders laid wreaths as choral music was played. Commemorations were also being held in Portsmouth, England.

"It was very moving," said Count Andre de Villeneuve, a fifth generation descendant of the French admiral who commanded the Franco-Spanish fleet that sailed from Cadiz into Cape Trafalgar on that fateful day.

"At the same time it is a sort of reconciliation between former combatants 200 years after the event. It shows we don't forget the horror and sacrifice of that battle," Villeneuve said.

Victory at Trafalgar by the British navy secured the country's control of the world's sea lanes and heralded more than a century of global maritime supremacy. For Spain and France, it marked the end of sea power, presaged the eventual fall of Napoleon, who ruled both countries, and signaled the beginning of the end for Spain's vast colonial empire.

The architecturally elegant port city of Cadiz, launching point for many of Spain's most audacious voyages of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, was chosen to host the event due to its proximity to the location of the battle.

It was from Cadiz that French Adm. Pierre Charles Villeneuve, aboard the Bucentaure, led a joint French-Spanish fleet of 33 warships -- 18 French and 15 Spanish -- out to sea on Oct. 19, 1805, to attack British shipping in the Mediterranean. Offshore lay Nelson's 27 ships.

The battle began shortly after noon on Oct. 21, and by evening the shattered Bucentaure had surrendered, Villeneuve was a prisoner and the Franco-Spanish alliance had lost 22 ships, the British none.

As the remains of Villeneuve's force tried to disengage and limp to the safety of shore more bad luck was in store. The French ship Achille, which had caught fire, exploded and the rest of the fleeing fleet was hit by a savage storm that drowned many battle-weary survivors.

As part of the commemoration in Spain, two square-rigged tall ships will link up with 28 luxury yachts later Friday to stage a small-scale re-enactment.

"It might perhaps capture some of the flavor of that day 200 years ago, with the tall ships bearing down on us as we sail in line with our yachts," said Richard Matthews, who helped organize the event.

The ceremonies will end with flowers laid in the water at 4:30 p.m. (1430GMT), the moment Nelson died from a bullet wound, knowing that victory was his.

Rose McMurray, a fourth generation descendant of Nelson, flew to Spain on the same plane as members of the Villeneuve family.

"The main thing is that now we can all look to a secure and peaceful future," she said.

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On the Net:

British Royal Navy Trafalgar bicentenary Web site: http://www.trafalgar200.com

Four and a half hours that changed the world
Adam Nicolson
National Post (Canada)
21 October 2005

The battle of Trafalgar was joined just after noon on Oct. 21, 1805 -- 200 years ago today. Four and half hours later, on a warm afternoon of light winds, it would be over. A French and Spanish fleet of 33 sail-of-the-line had been savagely and utterly defeated, with some 4,500 men dead, by a slightly smaller but far more effective British fleet commanded by Horatio, Lord Nelson. At the moment of victory, Nelson himself died of a wound received early in the battle, knowing that victory was his and knowing, as he murmured to those around him, that he had "done his duty."

Trafalgar changed the world. Any hope of a French seaborne empire was erased by it. From this moment, the Spanish empire began to fall apart. The British now commanded the world ocean, and their own 19th-century empire relied on the domination which the afternoon of Trafalgar had created for them. For another 10 years, Napoleon would dominate the continent of Europe, but the seas were denied to him. From the western seaboard of Europe and the Mediterranean, the British slowly strangled the Napoleonic empire. In some ways, Trafalgar made Waterloo inevitable. Together they created the Victorian world.

But what actually happened that afternoon? The central moment comes early on. Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory, is just coming within killing distance of the Franco-Spanish line. She had already suffered 20 dead and 30 wounded from the fire of the Combined fleet. The dead had gone over the side, if only to prevent their blood making the workspace of battle unusable. The wounded were already clogging the surgeons' tables in the cockpit. According to Nelson's specific instructions, their knives were warmed. The coldness of the steel at the amputation of his arm in the Canaries eight years earlier was something he wanted no one else to suffer. The shrieking came up from below.

Victory's rigging was now in tatters. A shot had destroyed the wheel and the ship was now being steered by commands shouted down (perhaps through a speaking tube) to 40 men manning tiller ropes in the gun room below.

This wounding of ship and crew, before a single shot had been fired in response, was an entirely conscious part of Nelson's plan. He knew that the spearpoints of the two British columns would take the most terrible battering from the enemy fleet. He had decided that the strongest ships in the squadron, the three-deckers, should lead those columns and that they should be captained by men he knew and trusted from the long campaigns in the Mediterranean over the previous five years. And he knew, equally well, that both he and his second-in-command, Cuthbert Collingwood, should be in the lead.

That was the essence of the tactics at Trafalgar: a front-loading of fire-power, inspiration, exposure and damage. Thus equipped, the leading ships of the British attacking columns could apply overwhelming force to the centre and rear of the allied line. It was the equivalent of a heavily armoured thrust, strong enough to resist the cannonade with which it would be greeted on the way in, devastating when it arrived.

Sailing warships were in many ways delicate things. If topgallant masts and even topmasts and yards were not "struck" or lowered in severe weather, they and their rigging would break. A line-of-battle ship was not made and manufactured in the shipyard as a finished object. It was in constant transformation, a continuous process of repair, attended to, battered by the sea and wind, endlessly nurtured by officers and crew. In a storm, fleets could not be held stiffly in position; they had to give before it, running with the wind, before returning to resume their stations after the stress was over.

A ship reflected, in many ways, its habit of care. For Nelson, outstandingly among contemporary naval officers, that habit extended to the well-being of the men he commanded. The mountains of lemons ordered for the fleet, the onions at every meal, the standing as godfather to the children of the wounded, the recommending of positions for men he knew and trusted, the courtesy to the slightest, the punctilious delivery of notes and letters: Humanity to one's own crew, just like the fastidious upkeep of the ships themselves, was what in the end would annihilate the enemy.

That is the context in which to understand the approach of Victory to the Combined Line. That ship, like those that followed, was one of the most carefully maintained objects in the world.

The great ship first aimed astern of the Santisima Trinidad, then aimed for a gap just astern of the Bucentaure, the French flagship. Captain Hardy, Nelson's flag captain, looked anxiously ahead and realized that the Victory could not pass through the allied line without "running on board" or colliding with one of their ships. He asked Nelson what to do.

His Lordship quickly replied, "Go on board which you please: Take your choice."

Damage and devastation were now the currency of victory. Prudence, so essential to the well-being of a fleet, was now to be abandoned. This was neither bravado nor bloodlust, but the application of a highly attuned mind to the essence of battle. It is a quality that defines Nelson, a trans-rational sense of when interference and attentiveness, the giving and structuring of orders, become secondary. It is the point at which the preparedness of a system is so all-encompassing that the system no longer needs to be looked after.

Everywhere in England, the received idea was that Nelson was a magician, that he triumphed by a kind of spell. There is an element of truth in that: Nelson's victory at Trafalgar would not have occurred if he had not allowed and encouraged free rein to the less conscious forces of devastating aggression, the desire to excel, the desire for prizes, the desire to kill and the desire to win. His potency as a commander rests in this very moment as Victory comes within a few yards of the stern of the Bucentaure. Here, his method -- you might say his art -- flicks over from careful to careless, from control to anarchy.

As that moment of intimacy approached, every man stood in the quiet of terror and discipline waiting for the first noise of battle. When it came, it sounded, it was said, "like the tearing of sails, just over our heads." But nothing except the air was being torn: This was simply "the wind of the enemy's shot," a passage of metal at speed above them.

If it passed close enough to you, it could, without touching, kill, merely with the shock of the pressure wave that a travelling projectile creates. Unblemished men would fall dead on the deck as the roundshot passed. Others, extraordinarily, found their clothes on fire.

Each ship trembled, deep into its frames and keel, with the reverberation of its own guns firing. The ship was a place of yelling, the guns roaring, the blocks and tackles with which they were hauled out through the gunports and manoeuvred to bear on the enemy, screaming and squealing like pigs on the point of slaughter. The noise of incoming and outgoing fire could scarcely be distinguished. From within the lower decks of the ships, enemy shot could be heard striking on the hull and bouncing away, all part of a maniacal frenzy of noise. According to one British sailor's account of naval warfare in that era, a battle resembled "some awfully tremendous thunder-storm, whose deafening roar is attended by incessant streaks of lightning, carrying death in every flash and strewing the ground with the victims of its wrath: Only, in our case, the scene was rendered more horrible than that, by the presence of torrents of blood which dyed our decks."

The sheer shambolic squalor of these battles is not to be underestimated. The ships were smeared with blood. Afterwards, large parts of the ships had to be repainted and each ship carried in its stores the paint necessary to efface the gore.

Grape and canister shot poured through the port-holes "like leaden rain." The sound of the large shot striking the ship's side was "like iron hail." The whole body of the ship was shaken by their impact, a deep, groaning thudding.

Even worse, when these 24 or 32 lb balls penetrated the hull, giant splinters, several feet long, would go spinning through the confined space of the gun decks, killing and maiming any bodies trying to inhabit what had become knife-filled air. A shot that came through the gunports was called "a slaughtering one," as it usually killed or wounded the entire gun crew. The dead were then shoved out into the sea by the hole through which their death had come.

At Trafalgar, the fleets become their ships, the ships their men, the men their instincts. Decision-making moved from admirals to captains, to gun captains, to the powder monkeys, the surgeons and their assistants buried in the bloody dark of their cockpits. It was the chaos which Nelson required and which his daring approach had imposed on the enemy.

The three navies involved in this bloody melee reacted to it in strikingly different ways, ways that can be seen as surprisingly symptomatic of the nations from which they came. The Spanish, products of a country still largely stuck in a pre-modern, aristocratic ideology, behaved with dignity and courage but little effectiveness. Their vast and beautiful ships, commanded by grandees who had no idea how to sail, for whom a good defeat was just as good as a victory, and largely manned, as one of their officers said, "by peasants and beggars," were mashed by their more professionally staffed British enemy.

Half the French fleet, acting to the strictly authoritarian codes of the Napoleonic navy, looked for signals from their admiral which never came or were invisible through the smoke, and so sailed away from the battle, irrelevant to it.

Only the British, driven by zeal and their hunger for prize money -- (ps)10,000 for each captain, perhaps the equivalent of US$2-million today -- thrived as the entrepreneurs of this most savage form of battle. It was battle as market, a place in which Britons already imbued with a distinctly modern, Atlanticist set of values -- commercial, libertarian, amoral and aggressive -- would be sure to emerge the victors.

That is one of the most striking aspects of Trafalgar: the deep, underlying and persistent differences between British, French and Spanish frames of mind appear to have been the governing factors which decided who won and who lost. Trafalgar, perhaps like all battles, was not only a meeting of fighting men, but a meeting of cultures.

Adam Nicolson is the author of Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty and the Battle of Trafalgar, published in September by HarperCollins.

Britain celebrates bicentenary of epic Trafalgar victory

PORTSMOUTH, England, Oct 21 (AFP) - Britain celebrated the 200th anniversary of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson's victory in the Battle of Trafalgar on Friday with thousands of events marking the historic fight.

Queen Elizabeth II was to lead the tribute, lighting a beacon at sunset beside Nelson's preserved flagship HMS Victory in Portsmouth, on the southern English coast, upon which the British war hero died during the battle.

A total of 1,000 beacons were to be set ablaze across Britain to mark the legendary day the British navy battered a combined French and Spanish fleet and eliminated the threat of invasion.

Elizabeth was then to dine on board Victory, raising a toast to the "immortal memory" of Nelson.

At the admiral's tomb in Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Alan West laid a wreath during a service.

Earlier at noon (1100 GMT), bells tolled on Royal Navy ships across the world to mark the moment Nelson went into battle.

The ceremonies began with Nelson's famous signal to his fleet, "England expects that every man will do his duty", being hoisted once more above his flagship.

In a solemn remembrance ceremony in lashing rain on Victory's quarterdeck, a wreath was then laid on the spot where Nelson was felled by a French sniper's bullet.

A second wreath was laid below decks where Nelson later died after hearing he had won the crucial battle for Britain.

West said Britain was abuzz with Trafalgar Day celebrations.

"I was amazed how it has gripped the spirit of Britain across the country. It's almost a Nelson fever going on," he said.

Second Sea Lord Sir James Burnell-Nugent, who laid the wreaths, said afterwards that it was a special occasion for the Royal Navy, Britain and the world.

"Nelson is a hero in all navies because most countries in the world have been involved in war at sea," he said.

Meanwhile off the southeastern Spanish coast, ships of the British, French and Spanish fleets dropped wreaths into the sea on the site where their forebears clashed.

The epic Battle of Trafalgar finished the threat of invasion by emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's France and established British naval supremacy for the next century.

Britain did not lose a single ship, while 18 opposing vessels were destroyed.

Colin White, the Royal Navy Museum's deputy director, said the bicentennial tributes had been planned for years.

"This whole year of Trafalgar celebrations has taken off in a way we hadn't even dared to hope it would," he said.

"What has really moved me is the way the whole country has got behind it to celebrate the sea and its importance to us as an island nation."

A spectacular maritime show is planned around the foot of the Nelson Monument in London's famous Trafalgar Square on Sunday, followed by a remembrance service at Saint Paul's Cathedral.

Nelson's tomb holds pride of place in the crypt which also contains the grave of fellow Napoleon-beater Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, and a memorial to World War II prime minister Winston Churchill.

Last month, the largest procession of boats seen on the River Thames in modern times recreated Nelson's waterborne funeral procession which drew some 100,000 people onto the London riverbanks in 1806.

In June, hundreds of ships from around the world gathered off Portsmouth as part of the Trafalgar commemorations, culminating in a battle recreation using replica 19th century ships and a blaze of pyrotechnics.