The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval engagement between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies during the War of the Third Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).
Wilhelm Carl Grimm was a German author and anthropologist, and the younger brother of Jacob Grimm, of the literary duo the Brothers Grimm.
Dame Emma Hamilton, generally known as Lady Hamilton, was an English maid, model, dancer and actress. She began her career in London's demi-monde, becoming the mistress of a series of wealthy men, culminating in the naval hero Lord Nelson, and was the favourite model of the portrait artist George Romney.
Gullinbursti is a boar in Norse mythology.
Rear Admiral Sir Home Riggs Popham, KCB, KCH, was a Royal Navy commander who saw service against the French during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He is remembered for his scientific accomplishments, particularly the development of a signal code that was adopted by the Royal Navy in 1803.
Admiral of the Red James Saumarez, 1st Baron de Saumarez, GCB was an admiral of the British Royal Navy, notable for his victory at the Second Battle of Algeciras.
Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, 1st Baron Collingwood was an admiral of the Royal Navy, notable as a partner with Lord Nelson in several of the British victories of the Napoleonic Wars, and frequently as Nelson's successor in commands.
HMS Agamemnon was a 64-gun third-rate ship of the line of the British Royal Navy. She saw service in the American Revolutionary War, French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and fought in many of the major naval battles of those conflicts. She is remembered as being Nelson's favourite ship, and was named after the mythical ancient Greek king Agamemnon, being the first ship of the Royal Navy to bear the name.
Admiral Sir Robert Calder, 1st Baronet, was a British naval officer who served in the Seven Years' War, the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars.
Guðbrandur Vigfússon, known in English as Gudbrand Vigfusson, was one of the foremost Scandinavian scholars of the 19th century.
Admiral Sir Richard Hussey Bickerton, 2nd Baronet, KCB, was a British naval officer. He was born in Southampton, the son of Vice-admiral Sir Richard Bickerton and first served aboard HMS Medway in June 1774, in the Mediterranean. His first command came in March 1779 when he was given HM Sloop Swallow as a reward for his part in an engagement with a much larger opponent. Bickerton later joined Rodney's squadron in the West Indies where he took part in the capture of Sint Eustatius in 1781. Making post captain on 8 February 1781, he took temporary command of HMS Invincible and fought in her at the Battle of Fort Royal on 29 April 1781.
Admiral Sir Hyde Parker was an admiral of the British Royal Navy.
Sir John Knox Laughton was a British naval historian and arguably the first to delineate the importance of the subject of Naval history as an independent field of study. Beginning his working life as a mathematically trained civilian instructor for the Royal Navy, he later became Professor of Modern History at King's College London and a co-founder of the Navy Records Society. A prolific writer of lives, he penned the biographies of more than 900 naval personalities for the Dictionary of National Biography.
Sir Anthony Cleasby was a British judge.
The Rev. Edmund Nelson, Rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, was the father of Admiral Horatio Nelson.
(Thomas Wood) Ingram Cleasby was the Dean of Chester in the latter part of the 20th century.
The Trafalgar campaign was a long and complicated series of fleet manoeuvres carried out by the combined French and Spanish fleets; and the opposing moves of the Royal Navy during much of 1805. These were the culmination of French plans to force a passage through the English Channel, and so achieve a successful invasion of the United Kingdom. The plans were extremely complicated and proved to be impractical. Much of the detail was due to the personal intervention of Napoleon, who as a soldier rather than a sailor failed to consider the effects of weather, difficulties in communication, and the Royal Navy. Despite limited successes in achieving some elements of the plan the French commanders were unable to follow the main objective through to execution. The campaign, which took place over thousands of miles of ocean, was marked by several naval engagements, most significantly at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October, where the combined fleet was decisively defeated, and from which the campaign takes its name. A final mopping up action at the Battle of Cape Ortegal on 4 November completed the destruction of the combined fleet, and secured the supremacy of the Royal Navy at sea.
Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Bertie KSO was an English officer of the Royal Navy who served during the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Richard Cleasby (1797–1847) was an English philologist, author with Guðbrandur Vigfússon of the first Icelandic-English dictionary.
Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronte,, also known simply as Admiral Nelson, was a British flag officer in the Royal Navy. His inspirational leadership, grasp of strategy, and unconventional tactics brought about a number of decisive British naval victories during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest naval commanders in history.
