Trafalgar

Gabriel de Araceli is an old man now, looking back across a long life to the events of his fourteenth year. He had been an orphan from the poorest streets of Cádiz when he was taken into the household of Don Alonso Gutiérrez de Cisniega, a retired naval officer who has spent his days refighting old battles on a tabletop and who cannot bear to miss the great one now gathering off Cape Trafalgar. When Don Alonso slips away from his formidable wife to join the fleet, Gabriel goes with him.

And so, almost by accident, the slum boy finds himself aboard the Santísima Trinidad, the largest warship then afloat, on the morning of 21 October 1805, as the combined fleets of Spain and France stand out to meet Nelson's Royal Navy. What Gabriel sees that day is not glory but catastrophe: the order and ceremony of the morning, the deafening violence of the action, the splinters and the smoke and the dying, the proud old officer who has waited his whole life for this—and at last the wreck driving before the gale with the wounded crying out in the dark.

Published in 1873, Trafalgar is the first of the forty-six Episodios Nacionales, Benito Pérez Galdós's vast fictional history of nineteenth-century Spain and one of the great projects of European realism. By telling the story through a frightened, fascinated boy—and an old man's rueful memory of him—Galdós makes the battle immediate as no chronicle could, and weighs the genuine courage of the men on the doomed fleet against the waste of what they were asked to die for. It is history seen from below: patriotism and its disillusion, and the human cost of a national disaster.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by Clara Bell.