[BITList] Temeraire

[John Feltham]

MARCH 6, 2009, 10:35 P.M. ET
The Tale of the Temeraire

A Great Painting Tells of the Ship's Final Passage


By MARY TOMPKINS LEWIS

In the late summer of 1838, H.M.S. Temeraire, a once-glorious remnant  
of the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, was towed up the Thames to the  
wharf at Rotherhithe, to be broken up and sold for her fittings and  
oaken timbers. J.M.W. Turner's painting of the doomed ship's final  
passage, in which he summoned her illustrious past by rechristening  
her the "Fighting Temeraire," never left his possession and became  
part of his bequest to the nation after his death in 1851 at age 76.  
Enshrined in the National Gallery in London since 1856 and embodying a  
nostalgic nation's memory of an age when it ruled the waves, Turner's  
canvas remains among his best-known and best-loved works. Even today,  
as scholars debate the meaning of its ambiguous but deeply stirring  
imagery, "Fighting Temeraire" elicits a charged emotional response.

Exactly 40 years before she met an ignominious end upriver, the  
Temeraire was launched to considerable fanfare at Chatham. A massive  
man-of-war of the Second Rate equipped with 98 guns (ships of the  
First Rate had 100 guns or more), vast stores of ammunition, three  
decks and a trio of towering masts, the Temeraire first served as  
flagship to the formidable Channel Fleet, a bulwark of Britain's  
maritime defense.A mutiny broke out on board in the winter of 1801  
when long-serving sailors, believing the war with Napoleonic France  
was ending, refused orders to sail for the West Indies, where rumors  
of an imminent French attack persisted. But this single stain on the  
ship's record was quickly forgotten after her valiant performance at  
Trafalgar. There, under Capt. Eliab Harvey in the waters south of  
Cadiz, the Temeraire's defense of Lord Nelson's lead ship, the  
Victory, helped turn the battle's tide, though not before Britain's  
greatest naval hero had been struck down. As Nelson lay dying below  
deck, the victim of a sharpshooter aloft the masts of the French  
Redoubtable, whose sailors prepared to board the Victory, the  
Temeraire materialized to unleash a savage broadside, slaughtering  
scores of French seamen and saving Nelson's colors from descent.

After the Redoubtable crashed helplessly into the Temeraire, British  
sailors lashed the smaller vessel to their portside and fought on.  
Their starboard guns yet to be fired, they turned to face another foe,  
the French Fougueux. Again at close range, the crew of the Temeraire  
crippled this ship too with a murderous cannonade, and tethered it  
along their other side. Although fighting continued in the outer fleet  
and briefly across the decks of the four ships tied together on the  
swelling seas, Nelson died knowing he had triumphed. His victory left  
Britain largely free from the threat of Napoleonic invasion. Decades  
later, Turner's ruminations on all of this would figure in the  
painting that immortalized one of Trafalgar's last surviving vessels.

Under a pale sliver of a moon at left and a sun that hovers on the  
horizon of a sanguine sky at right, Turner's majestic Temeraire glides  
soundlessly on the river's broad, glass-like expanse. Powerless now  
and pulled by a stalwart, steam-powered tug, an icon of the new  
technology that had replaced it, the hulking ship seems wraithlike,  
its image all but disappearing into the waters that capture so clearly  
the tug's reflection. A second steamer emits its own sooty trail in  
the background, and smaller sailing ships recede into the middle  
distance. Fog- and smoke-shrouded factories or storehouses appear on  
shore at right, and a skiff with tiny figures and a shadowed buoy  
float in the shallows closer up. There is little to distract us,  
however, from the arresting vision of the Temeraire on its final  
voyage, and the ineffable sense that we are witnessing the end of an  
era, a stately passage from an age that had harnessed human valor to  
one of machine-driven power. Turner's "Fighting Temeraire," in fact,  
is a history painting of the highest caliber.

Contrary to legend, we know that Turner did not witness the  
Temeraire's last journey up the Thames, and countless critics in his  
day and ours have enumerated the ways in which the painter plays fast  
and loose with the facts here. News accounts tell us, for example,  
that the ship had been dismasted before setting out for Rotherhithe.  
 From a contemporary print we learn that Turner moved the smoking  
funnel far to the fore of his tug; and a chart of the Thames makes  
plain that the westward course of the voyage has the sun setting,  
incongruously here, in the east.

The effect of each aberration is telling: The fiery, foreground plume  
draws our eyes to the Temeraire's ghostly, imagined masts, and to its  
broken spar that hangs limply at front, no longer supporting a  
jackstaff or the Union flag that was removed when it was sold to a  
ship-breaker. The blood-red smoke of the tug, moreover, echoes the  
distant scarlet sky, where the sun may fall on the glorious naval  
triumphs of Britain, or rise to illuminate the new age of industry  
that followed, or perhaps both, in Turner's cyclical vision of  
history. In many of his greatest paintings, including the pendant  
views of ancient and modern Rome with which he exhibited the  
"Temeraire" at the Royal Academy in 1839, or those of the rise and  
fall of ancient Carthage, another naval power often seen as a  
metaphoric mirror to modern Britain, such details remain not only  
ambiguous but irrelevant to the epic tides of history and human  
ambition that Turner captures in his visions of time as an endless  
continuum of change.

Though he mourned the Temeraire's newly decommissioned status and  
added two lines of poetry to its already lengthy title ("The flag  
which braved the battle and the breeze/No longer owns her"), Turner  
simultaneously celebrated here the industrial age that burgeoned now  
in a new era of peace. In his "Fighting Temeraire," Turner captures  
the unceasing flow of history itself on the waters of his beloved  
Thames.

Ms. Lewis, who writes frequently about the arts, teaches art history  
at Trinity College, Hartford.



ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.




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