look closer

The spires of Copenhagen stand behind the smoke. The Danish ships were moored in front of their own city, and people watched the fight from the shore.

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. London decided to break the League at its weakest point, 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 asked for 12 ships and the narrow channel along the city's waterfront. The Danes had moored blockships and floating gun batteries along it, with the Trekroner fort at the end. On the morning of 2 April, three of the 12 ships ran aground on the shoals before firing a shot. The rest anchored and slugged it out at 200 yards, 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. He hoisted signal 39: discontinue the action. Aboard the Elephant, Nelson kept walking the quarterdeck. He told his flag captain that he had only one eye, and so had a right to be blind sometimes. Then he put the telescope to the eye blinded at Corsica and said he really could 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. Nelson sent a note ashore, addressed to the brothers of Englishmen, the Danes. It offered a truce before the captured ships, burning with their wounded still aboard, turned into a slaughter nobody could stop. The Crown Prince accepted. The dead and wounded came to near a thousand British and rather more Danish. The League it was all for dissolved within weeks anyway. Tsar Paul had been murdered in March, and his successor wanted no quarrel with London. Nelson got a viscountcy. Parker was recalled a month later and never given a ship again. The phrase turning a blind eye left the fleet and went into the language. John Thomas Serres was Marine Painter to George III, and the Admiralty also paid him to draw coastlines for its charts. He put the city's spires above the smoke and the two anchored lines firing into each other. One rowing boat crosses the open water in front, on an errand nobody wrote down.