[TRAFALGAR.]

Fairburn's plan of Lord Nelson's victory over the combined fleet, off Trafalgar, October 21, 1805.

London, John Fairburn, 30 November 1805. 610 x 480 mm, engraved broadsheet, original colour, with letterpress text; discreet repairs; slightly dust-soiled. Although primarily a book-publisher, Fairburn also issued several broadsheets relating to particular events of the Napoleonic Wars. In this example, issued soon after news of Trafalgar had reached England, he illustrates a ‘view of Lord Nelson’s attack on the Combined Fleet, off Trafalagar, October 21, 1805’, as well as, in two smaller panels, a ‘plan of attack on the combined fleet by Lord Nelson’ and a chart showing the location of the battle. The letterpress text comprises Collingwood’s account of the action in a dispatch to the Admiralty (taken from the London Gazette Extraordinary of 6 November 1805), and his subsequent dispatches of 24 and 28 October, and 4 November. Lists of the British and Combined fleets (‘and how disposed of’), as well as the numbers of killed and wounded, are also included.‘At the end of the [Trafalgar] campaign Britain had an unchallenged command of the sea, in quantity and quality, materially and psychologically, over all her actual or potential enemies, which she had never known before . . . It has for some time been fashionable among British (though not French) historians to dismiss the victory as essentially marginal, or at best as the means of allowing Britain to survive until at last armies and allies could be found to win the war. But if a sea power could not commit her forces to the critical point somewhere in central Europe, neither could she risk them there. Trafalgar certainly was the means of survival, which is not a negligible achievement in a war which no other nation survived unscathed. Trafalgar achieved more than that, however. Napoleon had no sooner thrown away his fleet than he realized how much he needed it to break out of the strategic limitations of his situation, and spent the rest of his reign in a futile and immensely costly attempt to reconstruct it. He at least had no idea that sea power is irrelevant to great continental armies . . . . Trafalgar was also the guarantor of Britain’s economic prosperity, which allowed her to continue at war and to subsidize her allies at war, while Napoleon ground up and consumed the resources of France and all western Europe to feed his military ambitions’ (Rodger, Command of the ocean p. 543).MapForum.com, commenting on a similar item on the battle of the Nile, states: ‘Broadsheets of this kind were intended to capitalise on public interest in the events, and to provide a pictorial sense of events, so difficult for a newspaper to convey before the age of the photograph . . . . Broadsheet maps of this kind are rarely encountered for sale. Without the protection afforded by the covers of a book they were very susceptible to damage, both at the time and up to the present day; and once the event they related to had receded from memory, they were often simply thrown away’ (in MapForum.com, Antique Map Magazine, vol. I, issue 5, Ephemera).

• GBP 4,500.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: T2902

• bookseller: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)