Lord Nelson's Funeral Barge

The death of Lord Nelson was a national tragedy like no other for England. Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) was Britain’s greatest naval hero, the man whose victories at the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar broke Napoleon’s sea power and secured British dominance of the oceans. When he was killed at the moment of his greatest triumph at Trafalgar, struck down by a French sharpshooter, the nation mourned as it seldom had before.

“From Greenwich to Whitehall Stairs, on the 8th of January, 1806, in one of the greatest Aquatic Processions that ever was beheld on the River Thames” drifted the royal shallop (barge). The event is referenced in the modern lament Carrying Nelson Home. Nelson is mentioned in nearly a dozen other songs.