Union jack from Nelson's fleet unfurled again to mark Trafalgar Day

[Recursion]

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/oct/21/union-flag-from-nelsons-fleet-unfurled-again-to-mark-trafalgar-day

A battle-scarred veteran is to go on display again in the National Maritime Museum to mark Trafalgar Day.

The union flag flown by HMS Minotaur in the thick of the fighting on 21 October 1805 will be exhibited in the museum in Greenwich, London, after hanging for almost a century in a Kent church.

Negotiations to acquire the flag were only completed a year after the museum’s new Nelson gallery opened in 2013. After extensive conservation work, it finally goes on display to mark the famous victory.

Before the battle Nelson gave orders that on all his ships “a Union Jack is to be suspended from the fore-topgallant stay”, mainly to help identify friend from foe in the thick of the fighting. Although Trafalgar fakes abound, genuine surviving flags from the battle are very rare. The flag from his own ship, Victory, was carried in his funeral procession and then cut to pieces for souvenirs by the sailors who took part – scraps still occasionally turn up at specialist sales. The last complete flag sold at auction, from HMS Spartiate, went for almost £400,000 in 2009, 40 times the estimate.

[Joe Chi Minh]

1. I've seen a page of a document recording the names and

countries of origin of the sailors in a ship of Nelson's navy*, and some of them were Americans, Irish, too - a lot of foreigners, actually. I think it might have been the 'Theseus', which somehow survived an incredible battering in the battle of Santa Cruz.

But Americans seem to have gone wherever there was adventure. I once saw a documentary, filmed by an American lad from the crow's nest of a clipper rounding Cape Horn in very rough seas. The captain was German and I believe had a pet pig. At times, the whole deck of the ship was under water!

[gladium et scutum]

2. U.S. and Royal Navy warships

of the era were actually very cosmopolitan when it came to crew composition. The warships required large numbers of men and the navies were not very choosy when it came to race, ethnicity and nationality of their crews. American warships of the era sailed with black and Polynesian crewmen. Some of the Americans on Royal Navy ships could also have been pressed off of American ships. This was an issue that would contribute to the War of 1812 with the British. I suspect that the French and Spanish naval crews were of many ethnicities and backgrounds. There was an old saying in the Royal Navy that "ships, like the gallows, refuse no man."

[Joe Chi Minh]

3. There is no reason, surely, why they would be choosey about the race, ethnicity of their crews.

Crew of European stock might generally not be physically the equal of the Africans and Polynesians, but they would surely have been strong enough for the tasks they all faced. And as you say, they were desperate for crews and press-ganged a lot of innocent, family guys minding their own business into service - and if they had experience, all the worse for their chances of evading it, unless they went into 'the sticks'. The discipline in the royal navy was savage, too.

It might be why a great, great, etc, grandfather of mine, who hailed from Sunley-on-Thames, ended up buying a farm in a little farming community called Landshipping in South-West Wales. (I was told that those men in Nelson's navy were the rock stars of their day, accumulating a fair bit of money from the wardroom booty of beaten enemy ships. Nelson insisted that they get their share). He'd been a deckhand, ordinary seaman in the Battle of the Nile, and at Santa Cruz, lived into his nineties and many children. It seems that people who have really been at the sharp end seem to actually live longer, rather than shorter lives than others. It's as if their will to live was honed by their vicissitudes. Another example is that man who was the subject of the book and film of his life, Unbroken.

[gladium et scutum]

4. Thanks, nt

[Joe Chi Minh]

5. While I believe my remarks were factual, my apologies for the

elliptical-seeming racial slant. I doubt that you meant any racial slur on African and Polynesians.