Against every risk, I have said; and the men of to-day, born and bred to the use of steam, can hardly realize how much of that risk was in the weather.Except at the Nile, where the conditions were ideal for engaging a fleet moored in shallow water, Lord Nelson was not lucky in his weather.Practically it was nothing but a quite unusual failure of the wind which cost him his arm during the Teneriffe expedition.On Trafalgar Day the weather was not so much unfavourable as extremely dangerous.
It was one of these covered days of fitful sunshine, of light, unsteady winds, with a swell from the westward, and hazy in general, but with the land about the Cape at times distinctly visible.It has been my lot to look with reverence upon the very spot more than once, and for many hours together.All but thirty years ago, certain exceptional circumstances made me very familiar for a time with that bight in the Spanish coast which would be enclosed within a straight line drawn from Faro to Spartel.My well-remembered experience has convinced me that, in that corner of the ocean, once the wind has got to the northward of west (as it did on the 20th, taking the British fleet aback), appearances of westerly weather go for nothing, and that it is infinitely more likely to veer right round to the east than to shift back again.
It was in those conditions that, at seven on the morning of the 21st, the signal for the fleet to bear up and steer east was made.