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Copenhagen’s spires over the gun smoke. The battle was fought at anchor, close enough for the city to hear the orders.

The war that brought a British fleet to Copenhagen in the spring of 1801 was a lawyers' war about paperwork: the right to stop and search neutral ships trading with France. Denmark, Sweden, Prussia and Russia had formed a League of Armed Neutrality to refuse the searches, and London decided to unmake the League at its weakest hinge before the Baltic ice melted and let the Russian fleet out. Admiral Sir Hyde Parker commanded; his second, fresh from the Nile, was Vice-Admiral Nelson, who proposed to do the actual fighting with 12 ships through the narrow channel along the city's waterfront, against the moored blockships, floating batteries and the Trekroner fort. On the morning of 2 April three of his twelve grounded on the shoals before firing a shot, and the remainder anchored into a pounding match at cable's length that ran hotter and longer than anyone had promised. Four miles off, Parker watched through the smoke and made the decision of a careful man with a bad view: up went signal 39, discontinue the action. Aboard the Elephant, Nelson kept walking the quarterdeck. To his flag captain he observed that he had only one eye, and had a right to be blind sometimes, raised the telescope to the eye that had been dark since Corsica, and announced that he really did not see the signal. His own signal for close action stayed at the masthead. Around them, captains chose which admiral to believe, and believed Nelson. Within the hour the Danish line was falling silent, gun by gun, and Nelson sent ashore a note addressed to the brothers of Englishmen, the Danes, offering truce before the burning prizes with their wounded aboard became a massacre nobody could stop. The Crown Prince accepted. The butcher's bill ran near a thousand British and rather more Danish; the League it was all for dissolved within weeks anyway, because the Tsar had been assassinated in March and his successor wanted no quarrel. Copenhagen still marks the date; Nelson got a viscountcy; Parker was quietly recalled and never employed again; and the phrase turning a blind eye sailed out of the fleet into the language, where it has served ever since. John Thomas Serres painted the day with the city's spires standing over the smoke, the anchored duel at point-blank range, and a single rowing boat crossing the foreground on some errand between the fleets, small enough to be any of the notes that ended it.