Cock of the Walk

By nightfall of Oct. 21, 1805, the battle off Trafalgar was all but over. Admiral Lord Nelson, who paid for the victory with his life, had become forever the great captain of the seagoing British Empire. But to one commander in the shattered French fleet, there seemed at least a chance of honorable escape. Accompanied by three French ships of the line, Rear Admiral Dumanoir le Pelley sheeted home his sails and set off in his flagship, the 74-gun Duguay-Trouin, for the safety of a French Atlantic port. Badly scarred by gunfire from Nelson's own ship Victory, his Duguay was limping badly as she sailed southward.

A fortnight later the small French force was picked up by a British squadron in the latitude of Cape Finisterre. After a lengthy chase, Admiral Dumanoir ran out his few remaining guns, but within a few hours the Duguay^ lay helpless in the Atlantic wallow, waiting with her three sisters for British prize crews to take over.

New Duties. From that time on for more than a century, Britannia ruled the waves, and among her stoutest ships was the Duguay. Refitted and rechristened the Implacable, she sailed out in 1808 to fight triumphantly with the Swedes against the Russians, the French and the Danes in the Baltic. Some 30 years later she headed for the Mediterranean with a combined fleet of British, Austrian and Turkish vessels, in the 1840 war against Egypt. A symbolic cock (to show that she was cock of the walk) rode high above her royals when she returned to Britain.

In 1855, the aging Implacable was placed in honorable retirement as a training ship. One by one, as young future admirals learned to walk her sturdy oak planks and climb her graceful rigging, her old comrades in arms faded away. By the end of World War II, during which she served in Portsmouth as an admiralty storehouse, the Implacable and her onetime adversary the Victory were the only veterans of Trafalgar still afloat. The Victory was preserved as a monument. The Implacable was left to lie among condemned men-of-war at Portsmouth Harbor's head, her rotting hulk manned only by an aged watchman.

Last Post. Last week, flying the ensigns of both France and Britain, H.M.S. Implacable put out to sea for the last time. Escorted by the British destroyer Finisterre and the sloop Redpole, and loaded with 150 tons of carefully secured ballast, she was towed out of Portsmouth Harbor, past the moored Victory; 28 miles out, she was cast adrift. Her escorts' colors fluttered to half-mast, a guard of bluejackets aboard the Finisterre presented arms, and the bugler sounded last post. Then, at a signal from Rear Admiral Sir Algernon Willis, a charge of cordite blew the Implacable's bottom to smithereens.

Her back broken, the old warrior settled slowly into the trough, sea water surging through her open ports. But she would not sink. A tug was ordered in to ram. Still the Implacable stayed afloat. For three hours the old ship lay awash, her gunwales flush with the waves, her flags still flying. Then, as darkness fell, her old timbers parted and she went under. Victory's victory was at last complete.

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