And so, as the HMS Victory started its long, slow craw back towards Britain, Admiral Horatio Nelson was dunked in a barrel of brandy. Fortunately, the great man was small of stature (5″6 or 1.68 meters) so his crew didn’t have too much trouble stuffing him in. Things weren’t all plain sailing though. Over the course of the voyage gases emitting from Nelson’s corpse caused a build-up of pressure within the vat. Eventually, it caused the lid of the barrel to pop off; scaring the living daylights out of a sailor sitting nearby who thought his late admiral had risen—one assumes in a state of complete inebriation—from the dead.
Once the fleet reached Gibraltar, Beatty was forced to transfer Nelson’s pickled remains into a lead-lined coffin and replace the alcoholic mixture. Rumors began circulating that the men aboard the HMS Victory had discreetly drunk the entire barrel of brandy in which their late admiral was pickling. Hardcore (or indeed horrendous) as this would have been however, thankfully for the prestige of the British navy it turns out this was all they were: rumours.
While the Victory limped on, other ships were sent ahead to Britain to relay news of Nelson’s victory. The first to arrive was the aptly named HMS Pickle (its name had actually been changed from the HMS Sting four years prior to Trafalgar). After in Falmouth, Cornwall, on November 4, 1805, its captain Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood made his way to London to deliver the message. Despite Britain’s great victory, the news of Nelson’s death was painfully received.
In floods of tears, the reigning monarch George III was reported to have said, “We have lost more than we have gained.” The Times newspaper printed daily publications on the late, great admiral, and the HMS Victory‘s homeward bound progress. Poems, written both in British and Latin, flooded magazines and newspapers to such an extent that editors had to implore their readership not to send anymore. Nobody had any details about precisely what had befallen Nelson mind you… but this didn’t stop people from speculating.
When the HMS Victory finally docked in Britain, it was to a panoply of national interest. Amongst the chaos caused by visitors to the ship, Nelson’s body was transferred again into another lead-lined casket (it’s a small miracle that his skin didn’t fall off during the move) during which Beatty performed an autopsy, recovering the prized musket ball. After one fourth and final move to a wooden casket, the by this stage thoroughly pickled Nelson was prepared to lie in state. And on January 9, 1806, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London held his spectacular funeral, which, in today’s terms, came to the cost of around $1.2 million.
Immediately, Nelson’s posthumous story began to seep its way into British drinking culture. Navy rum became known as “Nelson’s blood” while drinking cask liquor through a straw was commonly referred to as “tapping the admiral”. And the legacy that still survives today: Shepherd’s Brewery produce a pretty decent ale called “Tapping the Admiral” and many pubs up and down the country are called “The Lord Nelson” or some other such variation. All this just goes to show that—like the brandy he was stored in—Nelson’s reputation is something that has only become more refined with age.