Battle of Trafalgar
The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a naval engagement fought by the British Royal Navy against the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies, during the War of the Third Coalition (August–December 1805) of the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815).
Trafalgar Campaign
By early November the combined fleet had been practically destroyed. Two ships of the line had been lost at Finisterre, twenty-one at Trafalgar and in the ensuing storm, and four at Cape Ortegal. No British ships had been lost in these engagements. Many of those that had survived in French or Spanish hands were badly damaged and would not be ready for service for some time. The British victory gave them unchallenged supremacy of the seas, securing British trade and sustaining the Empire. The continued failure of Napoleon to marshal his navies as he did his armies meant that the invasion of England never occurred. Already postponed several times, Villeneuve's defeat at Finisterre and his final failure to link up with the Rochefort and Brest fleets caused Napoleon to abandon his plans in favour of a march eastward. Trafalgar, with its 74 ships, became the last clash of its scale of the Napoleonic Wars; from then on the largest engagements were fought between no more than a dozen ships. After 1805 the morale of the French navy was destroyed, while its continued blockade in port robbed it of efficiency and will. While Napoleon returned to the possibility of an invasion some years later, it was never with the same focus or determination. The failure of his navy to fulfil its objectives left him disillusioned, while the timidity of its commanders and the determination of the British to resist them, both factors clearly expressed at various stages throughout the Trafalgar campaign, left the navy with a lack of purpose and direction.