The Battle of Trafalgar (painting) installation. The painting now hangs in the National Maritime Museum, also in Greenwich, London. This work depicts a scene from the Battle of Trafalgar, a naval battle fought between the British and Franco-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar in southwest Spain. The British had twenty-seven ships to the thirty-three of the Franco-Spanish fleet. Despite this, the British came out as decisively victorious and captured or destroyed nineteen of the Franco-Spanish ships. Admiral Nelson, of the British Navy, took an unconventional approach to this battle and split his fleet into two lines, one led by his flagship "Victory" and the other by
Coalition forces of the Napoleonic Wars as in Germany during the Battle of the Goerhde and the Battle of Leipzig, they were not viewed as being particularly effective. Mostly they effected terror in the enemy troops, who were unfamiliar with this kind of weapon. The French initially thought that the rocket troops were "lancers", as the firing device seemed from a distance to be a lance. At the beginning of the wars the tactics of the allied forces were different from the British tactics. For example, they tried to use the column, but as they almost always lost against the French, they had to develop another