The Temeraire

John Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, is among the most famous paintings of its day:


J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be Broken up
painted 1838 (click to enlarge)

This masterpiece of early Victorian Romantic art--the steam age tugging wood, mast, rope and sail to its final rest--hangs in London's National Gallery today. Here's the story behind the ship.

The Royal Navy captured the first Temeraire (a French 74-gun ship-of-the-line) off Lagos in 1759. The second Temeraire fought at Trafalgar, immediately behind (and to starboard of) Nelson's Victory, and was pictured by Turner when retired in 1838. A fourth Temeraire (reborn as a dreadnought) fought the Kaiser's fleet at the Battle of Jutland under Admiral Jellicoe. Today, the name "HMS Temerarie" refers to the Royal Naval Sporting center in Portsmouth.

Though unfamilar to the public, the third Temeraire's last act was as glorious as its imediate predecessors' was ignominious, according to Arthur Herman's To Rule the Waves.

She had been built in Chatham in 1875 with just two masts, armored and iron-hulled but with the largest fore and aft sails ever set on a British warship. In [1882], she was modern and up to date, with torpedoes, searchlights, and 11-inch guns. . . .

On October 3, 1890, at Suda Bay in Crete [the Temeraire became] the last Royal Navy ship to stand into harbor under sail alone. Her captain obtained permission from his admiral to sail rather than steam in, and for five hours she leisurely beat to windward until she was home, with her crew handling sails, sheets, bowlines, and braces as efficiently as they might have in Hawkins's or Nelson's day. The rest of the fleet, including the commanding admiral himself, stopped everything to watch.

Before Turner recorded the last voyage of the second Temeraire, American Herman Melville had served on a U.S. frigate (his inspiration for Moby Dick), and observed the British Navy particularly the Spithead/Nore mutiny (the impetus behind Billy Budd, Foretopman). On his second visit to London, in 1857, Melville saw Turner's painting and was inspired anew:

The fighting Temeraire,
Built of a thousand trees,
Lunging out her lightnings,
And beetling o'er the seas -

O Ship, how brave and fair,
That fought so oft and well,
On open decks you manned the gun
Armorial.

What cheerings did you share,
Impulsive in the van,
When down upon leagued France and Spain
We English ran -

The freshet at your bowsprit
Like the foam upon the can.
Bickering, your colours
Licked up the Spanish air,
. . .

But Trafalgar is over now,
The quarterdeck undone;
The carved and castled navies fire
Their evening gun.

O, Titan Temeraire,
Your stern-lights fade away;
Your bulwarks to the years must yield,
And heart-of-oak decay.

A pigmy steam-tug tows you,
Gigantic to the shore -
Dismantled of your guns and spars,
And sweeping wings of war.

The rivets clinch the ironclads,
Men learn a deadlier lore;
But Fame has nailed your battle-flags -
Your ghost it sails before:

O, navies old and oaken,
O, Temeraire no more!

I've never regretted the automobile; I don't yearn for horses. I don't even enjoy swimming. And I'm not the sort who prefers polishing the past to shaping the future. But from childhood, I've always lamented missing the age of sail--and beautiful sheet and canvas rigged ships like Nelson's Victory or Turner's Temeraire.