of Nelson seemed a dear
price to pay even for such a victory.

Some 2500 men were killed and wounded in the victorious fleet. Of the
losses of the Allies it is difficult to give an estimate. Every ship that
was closely engaged suffered severely, and hundreds of wounded went down
in several of those that sank in the storm. For weeks after search-parties,
riding along the shores from Cadiz to Cape Trafalgar gathered every day a
grim harvest of corpses drifted to land by the Atlantic tides. The allied
loss was at least 7000 men, and may have been considerably greater.

The news came to England, just after something like a panic had been caused
by the tidings of the surrender of a whole Austrian army at Ulm. It reached
Napoleon in the midst of his triumphs, to warn him that his power was
bounded by the seas that washed the shores of the Continent. Well did
Meredith say that in his last great fight Nelson "drove the smoke of
Trafalgar to darken the blaze of Austerlitz."

CHAPTER X

THE COMING OF STEAM AND ARMOURED NAVIES

THE FIGHT IN HAMPTON ROADS

MARCH, 1862

Trafalgar was the greatest fight of the sailing-ships. There were later
engagements which were fought under sail, but no battle of such decisive
import. It was a fitting close to a heroic era in the history of naval war,
a period of not much more than four centuries, in thousands of years.
Before it, came the long ages in which the fighting-ship depended more upon
the oar than the sail, or on the oar exclusively. After it, came our
present epoch of machine-propelled warships, bringing with it wide-sweeping
changes in construction, armament, and naval tactics.

Inventive pioneers were busy with projects for the coming revolution in
naval war while Nelson was still living. The Irish-American engineer,
Fulton, had tried to persuade Napoleon to adopt steam propulsion, and had
astonished the Parisians by showing them his little steamer making its way
up the Seine with clumsy paddles churning up the waters and much sooty
smoke pouring from its tall, thin funnel. The Emperor thought it was a
scientific toy. Old admirals--most conservative of men--declared that a
gunboat with a few long "sweeps" or oars would be a handier fighting-ship
in a calm, and if there was any wind a spread of sail was better than all
the American's tea-kettle devices. Fulton went back to America to run
passenger steamers on the Hudson, and tell unbelieving commodores a